How Much Does DevOps Cost for a SaaS Startup?

The Real Price of Infrastructure

Founders often look at AWS pricing pages and think, "Oh, a t3.medium is only $30/month. DevOps is cheap!"

They are wrong. The cost of DevOps isn't just the server—it's the people, the tools, and the hidden operational overhead.

1. The Human Cost (Salaries)

Hiring a full-time Senior DevOps Engineer is expensive. In 2026, the market rates are punishing for early-stage startups.

Verdict: If you hire full-time too early, you burn 20% of your seed round on one hire.

2. The "Hidden" Tool Tax

DevOps loves tools. And SaaS tools love to charge "per user" or "per GB".

• Monitoring (Datadog/NewRelic): $200 - $1,500 / month (Starts cheap, scales painfully).
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions/CircleCI): $50 - $300 / month (Minutes add up).
• Security (Snyk/SonarQube): $100+ / month.
• Incident Management (PagerDuty): $30 / user / month.

Total Tool Tax: Expect ~$500–$2,000/month just for the "ecosystem" around your code.

3. The Cloud Bill (AWS/GCP)

For a typical B2B SaaS with modest traction (10k MAU):

• Compute (EKS/EC2): $400
• Database (RDS Multi-AZ): $300
• Load Balancers & Networking: $150
• Storage & Backups (S3/EBS): $100
• Support Plan: $100

Total Monthly Infra: ~$1,000 - $1,500.

*This doubles if you forget to turn off staging environments.*

How to Lower Costs?

1. Don't hire full-time yet.

Use founders or fractional DevOps agencies to set up the foundation. Hire full-time only when "deployment pain" slows down the entire engineering team.

2. Use Open Source Tools.

Swap Datadog for Prometheus/Grafana. Swap PagerDuty for free Slack alerts (initially).

3. Leverage Startup Credits.

AWS Activate and Google for Startups offer $10k–$100k in credits. Apply for these immediately.