A founder messaged us on LinkedIn a while back with a question we get constantly: "I've talked to four dev shops and gotten quotes from $12,000 to $180,000. For the same product. How is that possible?"
It's a fair question. And the honest answer is that they probably weren't quoting the same product. They were quoting the same idea, but each studio was interpreting the scope differently, including different things in their price, and assuming different levels of quality and support.
This is the core problem with MVP pricing. The word "MVP" means something different to every person who says it. To some studios, an MVP is a clickable prototype. To others, it's a production-ready application with authentication, payments, admin dashboards, and automated testing. The price difference between those two things is enormous, and both studios will call it an "MVP."
So let's cut through the ambiguity. Here's how to think about what your product should cost, based on what we've seen across dozens of projects.
The three tiers of MVP
These aren't official categories. They're patterns we've observed after building enough products to see the same shapes repeat.
Tier 1: The focused tool ($15,000 to $40,000)
This is a product that does one thing well. A scheduling tool. A form builder. A simple dashboard that connects to one data source and displays metrics. Think of it as a product with one core workflow and minimal supporting features.
Typically this means authentication with email and maybe Google login, 5 to 10 screens, a database with under 15 tables, basic email notifications, and deployment to a managed platform. No complex integrations. No real-time features. No mobile app.
At this tier, you're looking at 4 to 8 weeks of engineering work for a small team. The product is functional and deployable but lean. There's no admin panel, the analytics are basic, and the design is clean but not custom-illustrated.
Most "I have an idea for an app" projects land here when properly scoped. The problem is that most founders add enough features during the planning phase to push themselves into tier two. We wrote about this exact pattern in our post on product scoping, where a founder came to us with 47 features and we shipped 11.
Tier 2: The platform ($40,000 to $120,000)
This is where things get real. A marketplace with two user types. A SaaS product with team management and role-based permissions. A B2B tool that integrates with Stripe, sends transactional emails, has an onboarding flow, and includes some form of reporting.
At this tier, you're looking at 8 to 16 weeks. The database schema is more complex, maybe 20 to 40 tables. There are multiple user roles with different permissions. The product needs to handle edge cases like failed payments, expired sessions, and concurrent editing. The frontend has real interactivity: drag and drop, filtering, search, dynamic forms.
Most funded startups building their first real product land here. The jump from tier one to tier two isn't linear. Adding payments alone doesn't just mean integrating Stripe. It means handling webhooks, managing subscription states, building billing management UI, dealing with failed charges, refunds, and the edge case where someone's card expires mid-billing cycle.
Tier 3: The complex product ($120,000 to $300,000+)
This is a product with real-time features, complex integrations, or significant infrastructure requirements. A collaborative editing tool. A platform that processes files (video, audio, documents) and needs background job infrastructure. A product that integrates with five different third-party APIs and needs to keep data synchronized across them.
At this tier, you're typically looking at 4 to 8 months. The engineering challenges are genuinely hard, not just "build more screens." You need background processing, caching strategies, potential message queues, and infrastructure that handles failure gracefully.
Very few MVPs should be at this tier. If your first version requires six months of engineering, you probably haven't scoped aggressively enough. But some products genuinely can't be simplified below this threshold. A real-time collaboration tool needs the real-time infrastructure on day one. You can't fake it.
What's included (and what gets left out)
The most common source of price confusion is what's included in the quote. Here's what varies wildly between studios.
Design. Some studios include full UI/UX design with wireframes, prototypes, and multiple revision rounds. Others expect you to show up with designs already done. Others use pre-built component libraries and do minimal custom design. The design phase alone can be $5,000 to $30,000 depending on the complexity and the studio's approach.
Testing. Some studios write automated tests as part of development. Others don't test at all and the product ships with whatever bugs exist at deadline. The difference in quality is significant, but testing adds 20 to 30 percent to the timeline and cost.
DevOps and infrastructure. Setting up CI/CD pipelines, staging environments, production monitoring, and automated deployments is real work that some studios include and others charge separately for. If the quote doesn't mention infrastructure, ask about it.
Post-launch support. Does the studio fix bugs for 30 days after launch? 90 days? Not at all? Some quotes include a warranty period. Others end at deployment.
Project management. Are you getting a dedicated project manager who handles communication, or are you emailing the developer directly? Both models work. But they cost different amounts.
When comparing quotes, don't compare the bottom-line number. Compare what's included. A $30,000 quote that includes design, testing, and 90 days of bug fixes might be better value than a $20,000 quote that includes none of those things. We've written a full guide on how to read a technical proposal if you want to know exactly what to look for.
The costs nobody mentions
The MVP price is the cost of building version one. It is not the cost of having a product. Here's what comes after.
Hosting and infrastructure runs $50 to $500 per month for most early-stage SaaS products. If you're on Vercel or Railway for the application layer and a managed database, you're at the low end. If you need background workers, Redis, file storage, and CDN, you're at the higher end.
Third-party services add up faster than people expect. Transactional email (SendGrid, Postmark) is $15 to $80 per month at startup volumes. Error monitoring (Sentry) is $26 per month. Analytics. Logging. Payment processing fees. You'll spend $100 to $400 per month on services before you have meaningful revenue.
Iteration and maintenance is the big one. Your MVP is a hypothesis. Once real users touch it, you'll learn things that require changes. Budget at least 20 to 30 percent of the original build cost for the first three months of iteration after launch. If you spent $60,000 building, plan to spend another $12,000 to $18,000 adjusting based on what you learn. We cover this in depth in what happens after you launch.
Security and compliance. If you're storing user data (and you are), you need SSL certificates, proper authentication, encrypted data at rest, and a privacy policy that reflects what you actually do with data. For certain industries, you'll need SOC 2 compliance, HIPAA considerations, or GDPR readiness. These aren't technically part of the MVP, but ignoring them creates legal risk.
How to compare proposals without getting played
Get at least three quotes. This isn't about finding the cheapest option. It's about understanding the range and seeing which studios are interpreting your scope similarly.
Ask every studio the same question: "What does this price NOT include?" The answer tells you more than the proposal itself.
Request a line-item breakdown. Not a single number. "Authentication: 2 weeks. Payment integration: 1.5 weeks. Dashboard: 3 weeks." If a studio can't break down their estimate, they haven't thought carefully about the scope.
Ask about the team composition. Are you getting one full-stack developer? A frontend and backend engineer? A designer? The team structure affects both the cost and the quality.
Ask what happens when scope changes. Because it will. Every project discovers requirements during development that weren't in the original spec. How the studio handles scope changes tells you a lot about how the engagement will actually feel.
The honest answer
Most SaaS MVPs that we build fall between $30,000 and $80,000. That includes design, engineering, testing, deployment, and 30 days of post-launch support. The timeline is usually 6 to 12 weeks.
Is that cheap? No. But a well-built MVP that ships in 10 weeks and lets you start learning from real users is dramatically cheaper than a poorly-built one that takes 6 months, requires a rewrite in year two, and teaches you nothing because it's too buggy to retain users.
The cost of your MVP is not the price of the code. It's the price of finding out whether your business works. Spend enough to get a reliable answer. Don't spend more than you need to.
If you have a product idea and want an honest estimate, send us a brief. We'll tell you which tier you're in and what it should realistically cost.