When the right answer isn’t a CMS, you need engineers who’ll actually build the thing. SaaS products. Internal tools. Customer portals. Real-time dashboards. We ship them on the stack that earns the build — not the stack the agency happens to know.
What we mean by “custom web & SaaS”
CMS theme work is one job. Building a real application — with users, billing, role-based access, queues, search, real-time updates, a meaningful database — is a different one. The two skill sets rarely overlap cleanly. We’ve been doing both since 2017, and the work that lives on this page is the second category.
A few concrete examples of what fits here:
- A B2B SaaS going from blank repo to first paying customer
- An internal admin tool replacing a $30K/year vendor product that didn’t fit anymore
- A customer-facing portal hanging off your existing eCommerce store or CRM
- A real-time tool — collaboration, chat, multiplayer editing, live dashboards
- A multi-tenant platform where every customer gets a subdomain and isolated data
- An API-first product the rest of your company plugs into
If your project is mostly marketing content with a few editable sections, you’re on the wrong page — look at our Custom Theme & Template Development or Headless / Jamstack Builds services. We’d rather route you to the right service than land a project we know we’ll resent shipping.
Stacks we actually ship on
We pick the stack to fit your team, your operational reality, and your two-year roadmap. Not the other way around. Three options cover roughly 95% of the custom-build work we do:
MERN Stack — MongoDB · Express · React · Node
The default for early-stage SaaS where speed-to-market wins. TypeScript end-to-end. Modern React (Server Components where they earn the complexity, plain React where they don’t). Node services that hold up when your traffic 10×s overnight. We’ve shipped MERN at every scale from beta-50-users to 5M MAU.
.NET MVC — ASP.NET in modern C#
The right call when Microsoft is mandated, when you’re integrating deeply with Active Directory or Entra ID, or when SOC 2 plus on-prem hosting is on the table. C# is genuinely good in 2026 — Entity Framework Core has matured, async patterns are clean, and Azure’s pricing is competitive again. We deploy to Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes, or self-hosted IIS — whatever your security policy mandates.
LAMP Stack — Linux · Apache · MySQL · PHP 8.3+
Don’t dismiss this. For internal tools and content-heavy SaaS that needs to outlast frameworks, Laravel + MySQL is still the most cost-effective foundation in the industry. We’ve inherited 8-year-old PHP codebases that work better than 2-year-old React rewrites we’ve also inherited. Modern PHP — strict types, PHPStan level 9, Composer-managed dependencies — reads like a different language than the WordPress plugins your team probably still associates with the word “PHP.”
We’ll happily talk about Phoenix (Elixir), Rails, Django, Go, or Bun-flavored anything — if your team already runs one of those, we’ll match it. We just won’t fake fluency on a stack we haven’t shipped at production scale. That’s how teams end up with bugs in the foundations a year after launch, and we don’t want to be the team that did that to you.
What’s actually in scope
The honest, boring list of what a custom web or SaaS build with us usually includes — not the marketing-bullet version:
- Database schema design from day one. Not retro-fitted after launch, when migrations are 10× the cost.
- Authentication & authorization. SSO, magic links, OAuth providers, multi-factor where the customer needs it. Auth0, Clerk, or custom JWT — whichever earns the line item.
- Role-based access control. RBAC that survives more than four user roles without becoming a nested if-statement that nobody dares to touch.
- Billing. Stripe by default; Chargebee or Paddle for international VAT/MOSS; Razorpay for India. We’ve built every flavor of subscription, usage-based, and hybrid billing.
- Email infrastructure. Resend, Postmark, or SendGrid for transactional. We don’t do marketing-email blast tooling — that’s what HubSpot, Loops, or Customer.io exist for.
- File uploads. Done properly. Signed S3 URLs, virus scanning, EXIF stripping for privacy, image resizing pipelines.
- Background jobs. BullMQ for Node, Sidekiq for Ruby, Hangfire for .NET. Whatever your stack uses — jobs that don’t silently fail at 3 AM.
- Real-time when needed. Native WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, or managed Pusher / Ably / Soketi when ops time matters more than the saved subscription cost.
- Search that scales. Postgres full-text search costs nothing and goes a long way. Algolia, Typesense, or Meilisearch when the query patterns earn the bill.
- API documentation that doesn’t lie. OpenAPI / Swagger auto-generated from the actual code, not hand-written and inevitably stale.
- Audit logging. Every B2B customer eventually asks. Build it from day one and it’s a footnote; build it later and it’s a sprint.
- Compliance. GDPR plus India’s DPDP Act 2023. Region-pinned data, export tooling, deletion workflows, processing records.
How a custom build with us actually runs
Most of our SaaS engagements run 8–20 weeks from kickoff to first paying customer (for MVP scope), and 4–9 months for a full v1.0 with billing, support tooling, analytics, and onboarding flows shipped.
We don’t do “Sprint 0” weeks of pure discovery. Week one is technical: stack confirmation, schema sketches, infrastructure decisions, a working CI pipeline, and a deployed staging environment with a real database and one feature shipped by Friday. You can show that to a stakeholder. You can’t show a discovery-findings deck.
Weeks two through launch are a Friday-demo cadence. Every Friday, a Loom video walks through what shipped, what got cut, and what’s queued. You give written feedback Monday or Tuesday. We re-plan Wednesday and ship through Friday. No status calls unless something’s on fire — and when something’s on fire, we’d rather fix it than report on it.
When this is the right fit
You should be on this page if:
- You’re a founder pre–product-market-fit or just past, and need someone to actually build the product
- You’re a B2B company that bought an off-the-shelf SaaS that no longer fits how you operate, and customizing it costs more than building from scratch
- You’re an enterprise replacing internal tooling that’s been duct-taped together over a decade and is now a hiring liability
- You’re an agency with a client whose project quietly outgrew your CMS-only stack and now needs a real backend
And this isn’t the right page if:
- The whole project is content plus lead-gen — that’s Custom theme development
- You’re 80% headless / Jamstack with a CMS authoring layer — that’s Headless builds
- The whole project is selling things — that’s eCommerce engineering
- You need a mobile app — that’s Mobile development
What our recent custom builds look like
Most of this work is under NDA — we can’t publish specifics on the public site. The shape of it, anonymized:
- A B2B SaaS for the operations side of a mid-market US retailer. MERN + Stripe + Auth0. MVP to first paying customer in 11 weeks.
- An internal admin tool for an Indian fintech, replacing a $40K/year vendor product. .NET MVC + SQL Server + Azure AD. Shipped in 14 weeks.
- A customer portal hanging off a 200K-customer Shopify Plus store. Node + Postgres + Shopify Admin API. Three-month build, sub-100ms portal load times.
- A real-time inventory dashboard for a B2B distributor. Phoenix LiveView + Postgres. Replaced four Excel spreadsheets and a Slack channel.
If you want specifics — architecture diagrams, code samples, performance numbers, a reference call with the founding team — we’ll do a private walkthrough under mutual NDA. Email connect@prizorai.com or fill out the form below.
Pricing & engagement
Most builds are flat-fee, scoped after a one-week paid discovery. Rough bands by engagement type:
- MVP scope — single happy-path, billing, auth, one to three feature areas: $40K–$90K over 8–14 weeks.
- Full v1.0 — everything above plus admin tooling, onboarding flows, billing edge cases, error monitoring, observability: $90K–$220K over 16–32 weeks.
- Internal tools — single-tenant, no public billing complexity: $25K–$70K over 6–12 weeks.
- Post-launch retainer — for the inevitable iteration after real users show up: $8K–$24K / month, capacity-limited.
We bill 40% on contract signature, 30% mid-build, 30% on production launch. No lock-in clauses. If something’s off in week three, you walk with everything shipped to date, full source code, and we hand the keys to whoever you choose next. We’d rather lose a project early than drag a bad fit through six months.
Start a build
Tell us about the project. The form below or connect@prizorai.com — whichever you prefer. We’ll write back within one business day with a fit assessment: honest, not a sales pitch. If we’re not the right team, we’ll say so — and where possible, point you at a team we’d trust with it ourselves.
