SaaS MVP development for a wedding startup
SaaS MVP development for Plannerd: a full product team shipped a multi-role wedding planning platform the founder could put in front of pilot planners.
- Geography
- Seattle, Washington, United States
- Stage
- Early-stage startup
- Team
- 1 senior + 2 mid full-stack engineers, 1 product designer, 1 product owner
The situation
Wedding planning runs on a chaotic mix of email threads, spreadsheets, paper contracts, and improvised tooling. Plannerd, a Seattle-based startup, set out to replace all of it with a single platform serving wedding planners, the couples they work with, and the vendors involved in every wedding. Founder Hannah Roze had the feature set defined; what she needed was SaaS MVP development with a complete product team behind it, engineering, design, and product ownership included.
The brief was a full project management and collaboration hub: scheduling, billing, form sharing, progress tracking, decision management, guest list and seating, and design inspiration. All of it had to ship as a clean MVP that the founder could put in front of pilot planners and refine from there.
What we built
Leanware supplied the whole team: a senior full-stack engineer, two mid-level full-stack engineers, a product designer, and a product owner, running as an AI-augmented dedicated team through our AI product engineering practice. One thing worth being precise about: the product itself ships no AI features. The AI was in how the team built it, not in what the platform does.
Role-based workflows
The platform is split by role. The planner role manages the engagement: decisions, budget, vendors, and design inspiration. The client role moves the couple through the same surfaces with permissions trimmed to what they need to see and approve. Both roles share guest list and seating management, with conflict detection at the table level so a seating change that breaks another table gets caught before it becomes a problem at the venue.
Built to change cheaply
Each section (decisions, guests, seating, design, billing) is its own module, so the founder can iterate on one surface without touching the others. That structure is what makes an MVP useful after launch: feedback from pilot planners lands as a scoped change to one module, not a rewrite.
The stack is React with TypeScript on the frontend, Django and PostgreSQL on the backend, AWS for hosting and infrastructure, and GitHub Actions for CI. The dashboard design and UX work landed as a coherent product rather than a stitched-together prototype, which mattered for the founder's pitch to pilot planners.
Outcome
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MVP shipped with planner, client, and admin role workflows in production
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Modular section architecture (decisions, guests, seating, design, billing) iterable independently
Plannerd shipped as a functioning multi-role SaaS MVP with the full feature set the founder briefed, and the platform is operational and in use by planners. At this stage of a product's life the outcome that counts is exactly that: a working platform a founder can demo and refine with real planners, with planner, client, and admin workflows running in production.
The modular build is the part that keeps paying off. Because each section stands alone, what pilot planners ask for next can be built without destabilizing what already works. It is the same early-product discipline behind engagements like iPrivy: SaaS MVP development is judged by what the first release makes possible, not by how much it crams in.
"Our experience has been extremely positive."
— Hannah Roze , Founder & CEO , Plannerd · Seattle, Washington
Engagement line
Engagement FAQ
What does SaaS MVP development cost?
The two drivers are team composition and scope. Plannerd ran with a senior full-stack engineer, two mid-level engineers, a product designer, and a product owner, building a defined feature set to a pilot-ready standard. The way to control budget is deciding what the pilot release genuinely needs, then cutting scope rather than quality.
What team do you actually need to build a SaaS MVP?
For Plannerd it took five people: one senior full-stack engineer, two mid-level full-stack engineers, a product designer, and a product owner. The designer and product owner matter as much as the engineers, because an MVP a founder pitches to customers has to hold together as a product, not just function as code.
How do permissions work in a multi-role SaaS platform?
Plannerd gives planners and couples the same underlying surfaces with different permissions: the planner manages decisions, budget, vendors, and design inspiration, while the couple sees and approves only what they need to. Shared features like the guest list and seating are visible to both roles, with table-level conflict detection so changes by one side don't silently break the other's work.
Can a SaaS MVP be structured so it's cheap to change later?
Yes, and Plannerd is built that way: decisions, guests, seating, design, and billing are separate modules, so a change to one doesn't ripple through the rest. For an early-stage product that expects to learn from pilot users, this is the difference between iterating weekly and re-testing the whole platform on every release.
Do your SaaS MVP development services cover products like custom event management software?
Yes. Plannerd is an event coordination platform at its core: scheduling, vendors, guests, seating, billing, and client collaboration for an unusually logistics-heavy kind of event. The same multi-role, modular approach applies to custom event management software in other verticals.
Was AI used to build Plannerd?
In the delivery, yes; in the product, no. The team ran AI-augmented development to move faster through the build, but the platform itself ships no AI features. We think that distinction should be stated plainly rather than implied away.