SaaS development in Dubai, from a company that ships its own
Telora Labs is a SaaS development company in Dubai. We build multi-tenant products: the sign-up nobody attends, the tenant isolation, the subscription billing, the support tooling, and the part your customers actually pay for. We have also built three SaaS products of our own, and you can go and look at all three: one is live and public, one is in private beta, and one we shut down.
What counts as SaaS development, and what does not
SaaS development means building a multi-tenant product with external paying users: people outside your company who sign up on their own, get data isolated from every other customer, and are billed on a subscription. That is a different build to an internal application, and a different build again to an AI agent. The table sorts the three, because two of them have their own pages on this site and we would rather send you there than sell you the wrong thing.
| What you are building | Who signs in | How it gets paid for | The page you want |
|---|---|---|---|
| A product other companies subscribe to | Customers you have never met, on accounts they create themselves | Recurring subscription, per seat or per usage, charged by you | This page |
| An internal application for your own team | Your staff, on accounts you provision | You paid for it once and you own it | Custom application development |
| Software that reads, decides and acts in systems you already run | Nobody signs in. It runs on a trigger and escalates to a person | Fixed-price build, AED 10,000 to 50,000 | AI agent development |
The distinction is commercial before it is technical. An internal application can ship with one tenant, one login route, and an invoice from us rather than from you. A product cannot. On the first day a stranger signs up, it needs isolation that survives a support engineer running the wrong query, a billing path for a card that declines at 2am, an empty state that teaches somebody what the product is for, and a way to hand a customer their data back when they leave. None of that is the feature you had the idea about, and all of it is in scope.
Which SaaS products have you built yourselves?
Three, and here are the links, because a claim you cannot click is not a claim. They are in three different states and we are going to be exact about which is which, since you are about to go and check.
| Product | What it is | State today |
|---|---|---|
| Invoxly | Invoicing, time tracking and client management for freelancers and small businesses | Live and public. Go and use it. |
| Spendly | Budget tracking and multi-currency personal finance | Private beta, behind a password. No public sign-up today. |
| Qivora | Clients, proposals, contracts, projects, time, expenses, invoices and payments in one workspace | Shut down. Marketing site up, product not running. |
Invoxly, the one you can check in a minute
Invoxly is professional invoicing, time tracking and client management, built for freelancers and small businesses. It is live and it is public: the application is reachable by anyone reading this, and you do not need an introduction from us to try it. We are not going to put a user count or a revenue figure next to it, because we do not publish those, and a number you cannot verify is worth less than a URL you can.
Spendly, in private beta
Spendly is a budget tracker and multi-currency finance application. It is in private beta and sits behind a password, so nobody can sign up for it today. That is worth saying plainly rather than letting a marketing page imply otherwise, and it is the same standard we would hold your product to when you write your own launch copy.
Qivora, the one we stopped
Qivora was one workspace for clients, proposals, contracts, projects, time, expenses, invoices and payments, aimed at freelancers and small service businesses. We built it, we ran it, and we decided it was not working, so we shut the product down. The marketing site is still up; the product behind it is not running and is not available to anyone. If you click through, that is what you will find, and it is what a shutdown looks like from the outside.
Why we tell you about the one we shut down
Because for a founder choosing a build partner it is the most useful thing on this page. Building a product and operating one are different disciplines, and the second is where the surprises live: what a failed subscription payment does to your support inbox, what happens the first time a customer asks for an export of everything, how much of a roadmap turns out to be billing edge cases and permission bugs. We have done both, on our own money, and the three links above are how you check that rather than take it on trust.
Stopping taught us more than shipping did. The hardest decision in product work is not what to build next, it is when to stop building, and an agency billing by the sprint has no reason to raise it. So when you are interviewing whoever ends up building your product, the question worth asking is not whether they can build it. Ask which of their own products is live, which is in beta, and which one they retired, and then go and check the answers.
That is also the premise of our AI consulting: a short paid assessment of one workflow whose written recommendation is sometimes do not build this. If you are earlier than a build and the real question is whether the product should exist, start there instead of here.
What goes into a SaaS build
Products are built in Ruby on Rails against PostgreSQL, deployed to infrastructure in your accounts, with subscriptions on Stripe. The list below is the work that exists in every SaaS product and in almost no internal application, which is why a product build is not an internal build with a payment form bolted on.
Tenancy and access
Every record scoped to a tenant at the database layer rather than by remembering to filter. Invitations, roles, and an owner who can remove somebody who has left. The test suite includes the case where one tenant tries to read another's data, because that is the bug that ends a product.
Subscription billing
Plans, trials, mid-cycle plan changes with proration, and cancellation, all of which Stripe Billing supports directly. (Verified July 2026 against Stripe's subscription documentation.) The work is in the failure paths: the declined card, the customer who downgrades on day 3 of a month they paid for, the refund your support person has to issue without a developer.
Onboarding you will never attend
Sign-up, email verification, and a first run that makes sense to somebody who has read only your landing page. Empty states are a feature here, not a placeholder. It is the part we underestimated on our own products, which is why it is scoped explicitly on yours.
Admin and support tooling
An internal console where a non-developer can find a customer, see their plan, impersonate with an audit trail, and fix the thing they are emailing about. Without it, every support ticket becomes an engineering ticket.
Getting data out
Export in a format a customer can open, and a documented path for closing an account. It is the thing your buyer's procurement will ask about, and building it late is more expensive than building it early.
The AI parts, if there are any
Extraction, classification, drafting or an agent that acts on a customer's behalf, built as a defined component with a test set rather than a prompt in a controller. See AI agent development for how that half is scoped and priced.
Under the hood: Rails and PostgreSQL, Stripe for subscriptions, transactional email for everything the product sends, and Slack for the alerts that tell your team a payment webhook stopped arriving. Where the product has to sync to a customer's own systems, that is API integration work against Salesforce, HubSpot, Xero or QuickBooks, and it is scoped as its own line.
What this looks like in practice
The scenarios below are illustrative. They describe what a build of this shape does rather than accounts of specific client projects, and they claim no results. Our use cases page carries more of the same kind.
"We built something for our own operations and three companies in our industry have asked whether they can use it."
The build is not the feature they asked for, it is everything around it. The data model gets a tenant boundary and the queries get scoped to it. Sign-up, invitations and roles replace the accounts your ops manager created by hand. Stripe takes over from the invoices you were raising yourself. An admin console appears so support does not route through the person who wrote the code. The original tool is the smallest line in the estimate.
What you own: the repository, the Stripe account, the infrastructure, and the customer relationships.
"We have the idea and the first customers lined up, and we need something they can pay for."
Scope starts from the smallest product that can charge money, not the roadmap. One workflow done properly, sign-up, one paid plan, and the support tooling to run it. Everything else is written down and deferred in the open, so the deferral is a decision you made rather than a corner we cut. You launch to the customers you already have, and the second phase is scoped against what they actually do rather than what the pitch deck assumed.
What you own: a running product, and a written list of what was deliberately left out.
"Our product works, and now every competitor has shipped an AI feature."
This is the case where the agent bands apply, because the work is an agent or a bounded generative component sitting inside a product that already exists. It gets a defined tool surface, a test set of real past cases with expected outcomes, and a rule for what it does when it is not confident. It is quoted separately from any product work, so you can see what the AI half costs and decide it is not worth it.
What you own: the test set, which is what makes it safe to change the feature later.
Where a SaaS build is not the right fit
Four situations where we would tell you not to buy this, and what to buy instead.
You have one customer, not a market
If the software serves your own team, or one client who is paying for it directly, the multi-tenancy and the billing are cost with no return. Build the internal application, and add the product layer later if a second buyer appears.
Nobody will operate it after launch
A product is not a project that ends. Somebody has to answer support email, decide refunds, watch for the payment webhook that stopped arriving, and own the roadmap. If that person does not exist and is not being hired, the launch is the start of the problem rather than the end of it.
The whole differentiator is the AI demo
A demo that works on five inputs proves the easy half. If the product is the model output and nothing else, a competitor ships it in a fortnight. Take that to the assessment before it becomes a build.
You need it profitable in month one
A build price is fixed and payable now; subscription revenue arrives slowly and only if people renew. If the business cannot survive that gap, the honest answer is to sell the service manually first and productise the part people actually pay for.
What does a SaaS product build cost?
We do not publish a price band for SaaS product builds, and we are not going to invent one on this page. Scope is set per build after the discovery call, and the price is fixed in writing in the proposal before any work starts, which is the same commitment as every other engagement on this site.
The reason there is no band is that the range is genuinely wide. Two products with the same one-line description differ by a factor of several once you know how many roles the permission model has, whether billing is per seat or metered, whether anything has to sync into a customer's own Salesforce or Xero, and whether the first version needs one paid plan or four. We would rather scope yours than publish an average that is wrong for you in both directions.
The AED 10,000 to 50,000 bands published elsewhere on this site are for AI agent builds. They apply to the agent or automation work that sits inside a product, not to the product itself. If your build has both, they are quoted as separate lines so you can see which number is which, and the arithmetic behind the agent side is broken down in what an AI agent costs in Dubai.
Running costs sit outside the build price and are billed to you by the vendors rather than by us: hosting, model usage where the product uses a model, and Stripe's own processing fees. You see them in your own accounts, which means nobody has an incentive to hide them inside a retainer.
What you get, and how the engagement runs
It starts with a free 30 minute discovery call, then a written scope and a fixed price you approve before anything is built, then weekly updates through the build. That is steps 01 to 05 of how we work, unchanged. The one difference worth flagging: product builds usually run longer than the 2 to 4 weeks quoted there for most projects, and the scope names a date rather than an average, so you see the length before you sign rather than after.
The code, in your repository
Handed over as it is written, not at the end. No dependency on a Telora Labs account for the product to keep running, and no licence back to us.
Infrastructure and accounts in your name
Hosting, database, domain and the Stripe account belong to you from the first deploy. Your customers' payment relationship is with your company, which is the only arrangement that survives you changing developer.
A runbook a non-developer can follow
How to deploy, how to restore the database, what the alerts mean, and what to do when the payment webhook stops. Written for whoever is on call after handover.
An optional monthly retainer
Changes, new features and monitoring after launch run on a monthly retainer priced in the same proposal, so you see the running cost before you commit to the build. You are not committed to it and the code is yours either way.
Common questions
Do you have SaaS products of your own?
Three, and each is in a different state. Invoxly is live and public, and anyone can go and use it. Spendly is in private beta behind a password, so nobody can sign up for it today. Qivora is shut down: its marketing site is still up, but the product is not running and we decommissioned it.
What does a SaaS product build cost in Dubai?
We do not publish a price band for SaaS product builds. Scope is set per build after a free 30 minute discovery call, and the price is fixed in writing in the proposal before any work starts. The AED 10,000 to 50,000 bands published elsewhere on this site are for AI agent builds, and they apply to agent or automation work that sits inside a product rather than to the product itself.
Is SaaS development the same as custom application development?
No. Custom application development is an internal application for one organisation's own team, on licences that organisation controls. SaaS development is a multi-tenant product with external paying users, which adds sign-up, tenant isolation, subscription billing, support tooling and a churn number nobody has to think about in an internal build.
Tell us what the product is and who pays for it
Send the product in a paragraph, who the paying user is, and whether anything exists yet. We will tell you what the first version should contain, what it would take to build, and whether you should be building it at all.
hello@telora.dev