You’ve got an idea. You’ve validated it (hopefully). Now you need to build it. The first question every founder asks: how much is this going to cost me?
The honest answer is that it depends — but “it depends” is a useless answer to walk into a vendor conversation with. Here is a real breakdown, with numbers.
The short answer
| Who builds it | Typical MVP range | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Large agency | $50K–$200K+ | Enterprise buyers with procurement requirements |
| Offshore team | $10K–$50K | Teams with an in-house technical lead to manage them |
| Specialized dev studio | $25K–$80K | Startups who need senior judgement and speed |
| Solo freelancer | $15K–$40K | Narrow, well-specified single-platform builds |
For most funded or bootstrapped startups building a first product, the realistic number is $25,000 to $80,000 over 8 to 12 weeks.
Where you land inside that range is driven almost entirely by four things: how many types of user your product has, how many external systems it talks to, whether it touches regulated data, and how fast you need it.
The three tiers, and what you’re actually paying for
Big agencies: $50K–$200K+
You’re paying for the brand, the account managers, and the proposal deck. The developers building your product may be three layers removed from the person you talk to, and the rate you’re quoted has to cover a sales team, a bench of idle staff, and an office. Agencies genuinely earn this when the buyer is an enterprise with procurement requirements, security review processes, and a need for institutional accountability. For a startup hunting product-market fit, it is overkill you’ll feel in your runway.
Offshore teams: $10K–$50K
Tempting on paper, and the talent is real — there are outstanding engineers everywhere. The cost that doesn’t appear in the quote is coordination. A question that takes two minutes to resolve in your timezone takes two days across a twelve-hour gap, and that latency compounds across hundreds of small decisions. Specifications have to be far more complete up front, because ambiguity gets resolved without you rather than with you.
This model works well when you already have an experienced technical lead in your timezone whose job is to manage it. It works badly when the non-technical founder ends up doing that job by accident, which is the single most common way founders end up with an expensive codebase they can’t use.
Specialized dev studios: $25K–$80K
The sweet spot for most startups. A small senior team that has built products before, knows which corners are safe to cut and which aren’t, and gives you direct access to the people writing the code. No account manager between you and the engineer. The premium over offshore buys you judgement and reduced rework; the discount against an agency comes from not funding a sales org.
What actually moves the number
Number of user types. This is the biggest single driver and the one founders consistently underestimate. A single-user SaaS tool has one set of flows. A two-sided marketplace has buyers, sellers, and an admin surface to mediate between them — that is roughly three products wearing a trench coat, and it prices accordingly.
Integrations. Every third-party service adds time, and the time is wildly non-uniform. Stripe is excellently documented and predictable. A regional payment provider, a legacy healthcare system, or an industry API written in 2014 with a PDF for documentation can consume more time than several product features combined. When you get a quote, ask specifically what integration assumptions it makes.
Regulatory scope. If your product touches protected health information, payment card data, or financial records, the compliance requirements are architectural, not cosmetic. HIPAA means encryption, audit logging, access controls, and Business Associate Agreements across your entire vendor stack — decisions that have to be made before the first feature is built, because retrofitting them means a rewrite. Expect a meaningful premium, and be much more suspicious of a cheap quote.
Design expectations. A clean, functional UI is standard and should be included. A fully custom design language with bespoke illustration and micro-interactions is a separate line item. For an MVP, functional wins — you are buying information about whether people want the thing, not a design award.
Timeline. Compressing ten weeks into five doesn’t halve the calendar, it raises the weekly burn and the coordination overhead. Rush work carries a premium and a quality risk, and it is usually the wrong trade before you have validated demand.
Three worked examples
A single-user B2B SaaS tool — near $25K–$35K. One user type, email and password auth, Stripe subscriptions, a dashboard, and a settings page. No marketplace mechanics, no regulated data, one platform. This is the cleanest possible MVP scope and it should be priced accordingly.
A two-sided marketplace — near $55K–$80K. Buyers, sellers, an admin console, search and matching, split payments with escrow, reviews, and dispute handling. Every one of those is a system, and the payments piece alone carries real complexity around refunds and payout timing.
A HIPAA-compliant health product — $70K and up. Everything in the first example, plus PHI encryption at rest and in transit, queryable audit logging, role-based access control over health records, and BAA coverage across every vendor that touches the data. The compliance work is not a phase at the end; it constrains the architecture from day one.
How to not get ripped off
- Get a fixed price for a defined scope. If a vendor can’t give you a number after a real discovery conversation, they either don’t understand the product or don’t want to be accountable for the estimate.
- Get the scope in writing, including exclusions. “What is explicitly not included?” is a more informative question than “what’s included?” and far fewer founders ask it.
- Talk to the actual developers. If you can’t meet the people who will write your code, you don’t know what you’re buying.
- Confirm who owns the code and the accounts. You should own the repository, the cloud project, the domain, and the app store listings. If the vendor holds any of these, you have a dependency, not a supplier.
- Ask what happens when you change your mind. You will. A vendor with a clear, unemotional answer about change requests has done this before.
- Ask what post-launch costs. An MVP that ships with no plan for maintenance is a product with an expiry date.
What an MVP should deliberately exclude
Cost control is mostly scope control. Things that almost never belong in a first build: a custom admin panel where an off-the-shelf tool would do, a mobile app when a responsive web app answers the same question, SSO before an enterprise customer has asked for it, multi-language support, and any AI feature that isn’t the core value proposition. Each of these is a real feature that some founder needed — just not in the version whose only job is to prove someone will pay. For what does belong in a first SaaS build, see the SaaS MVP checklist.
The real answer
Every project is different. A simple MVP might be $25K. A complex or regulated one might be $80K or more. The fastest way to find out what yours costs is to talk through the scope with someone who will tell you if it’s smaller than you think.
Request a technical triage with IN2Labs — I’ll give you an honest estimate, even if I’m not the right fit. If what you actually need is ongoing technical leadership rather than a build, see what a fractional CTO costs. You can also read about my SaaS MVP development process, see what I’ve built for clients, or compare fractional CTO vs. technical co-founder if you’re still deciding how to get technical leadership in the building.