How much does an MVP cost, and what are you actually paying for?

Ask five studios what an MVP costs and you'll get five answers that are hard to compare. That's rarely because one of them is wrong. It's because each quote bundles a different amount of discovery, design, project management and risk, and very few of them say which.

So instead of a range, here is what the money goes on, and how we price ours.

The four things you pay for

• Deciding what to build. Turning an idea into a short, written scope is real work, and it's the work most likely to save you money later.
• Designing the screens that matter. Not every screen: the ones your first users will spend their time on.
• Building and connecting it. Sign-in, data, payments, email and the tools it needs to talk to.
• Launching it properly. Hosting on your accounts, error monitoring, and someone around to fix what the first users find.

Everything else, such as account managers, long discovery phases and weekly status meetings, is overhead. Some projects need it. Most first versions don't.

Why the same idea gets very different quotes

The biggest driver isn't the hourly rate. It's scope. A quote for everything you mentioned in the first call will always be several times larger than a quote for the one workflow that proves the idea. If two quotes differ wildly, ask each studio what's in and what's out. The answer tells you more than the number.

The second driver is who carries the risk. Hourly billing puts it on you: if the build takes longer, you pay more. A fixed price puts it on the studio, which is only possible when the scope is written down and limited.

How we price an MVP

We publish our prices. The 7-Day Sprint is $1,500 for one core workflow, up to five screens and one kind of user. The 14-Day Build is $2,700 for up to three workflows, twelve screens, and users plus an admin. The 21-Day Launch is $3,700 for up to five workflows, twenty screens and several roles. Anything bigger is scoped as a custom build with a fixed price for each phase.

You pay 50% to start and 50% at launch. The code lives in a repository in your name from day one, and the intellectual property is yours on final payment. Fixes are included for 14 days after launch, or 7 on the Sprint. The full limits, including what each package leaves out, are on the pricing page.

How it can cost this little

Three reasons, none of them a discount. The people who scope your product are the people who build it, so nothing is lost in handoffs. Sign-in, billing, admin and deployment start from proven building blocks rather than from scratch. And we use AI tools for routine code, with every line reviewed by an engineer before it ships.

The fourth reason matters most: we cut. The first version does one job well enough for real people to use it. Everything else goes on a written list for the next version, where it can be priced with what you've learned.

Questions to ask any studio before you pay

• What exactly is in the first version, and what isn't?
• Is the price fixed, and what would change it?
• Whose accounts will the code, hosting and data live on?
• What happens when something breaks the week after launch?

If the answers are written down before you pay anything, you're in good hands, whoever you choose.