How much does an MVP cost?
What it costs to get a testable product in front of real users.
What are you building?
What does it need to do?
How much design?
$20,000 – $70,000
- Effort
- 71–142 days
- Elapsed time
- 1–4 months
- Day rate assumed
- $320–$480
An indicative range, not a quote. Real scope moves these numbers, usually once we understand the parts you have not described yet.
Where the effort goes
- Build52–104 d
- Discovery & scoping6–12 d
- QA & testing8–16 d
- Project management5–10 d
Get a real number
Send this over and we'll come back with a scoped estimate — including the questions that would change it. Two business days, no sales script.
An MVP is not a cheap version of the finished product. It is the smallest thing that answers the riskiest question you have. The discipline is deciding which single question that is — because every feature added to find out something you could have learned another way is budget spent on delay.
What a project like this usually includes
- One core journey, finished
- A single path through the product that works properly, rather than five that half work.
- Accounts
- Enough authentication to have real users with real data, and no more.
- An existing design system
- A considered, well-built interface without a bespoke identity. Visual differentiation is worth paying for once you know the product is right.
- Manual back office
- Doing operations by hand at first is usually correct. Automating a process you have run a dozen times is cheap; automating one you have never run is guesswork.
- Basic analytics
- Enough instrumentation to answer the question you built it to answer.
What actually moves the number
- Scope discipline
- The largest single factor, and entirely within your control. Most MVP budgets are spent on features nobody asked for once launched.
- Design depth
- Using an existing design system rather than commissioning a brand can cut a meaningful slice off the total.
- Integrations
- Every external system in version one is scope and risk. Most can wait.
- Scale assumptions
- Building for a million users you do not have yet is the most expensive mistake in this category. Build for the users you can realistically reach in six months.
What belongs in an MVP and what does not?
Include whatever is needed to answer your riskiest assumption, and nothing else. Admin dashboards, settings screens, notification preferences, onboarding tours and integrations can nearly always wait. If a feature does not change what you learn from launching, it belongs in version two.
Will we have to rebuild it later?
Parts of it, and that is fine — that is what it was for. Built sensibly, the foundations carry forward and the throwaway parts are the ones you deliberately did by hand. An MVP that could not be thrown away was over-built.
How fast can an MVP ship?
Commonly six to twelve weeks for something genuinely narrow. What stretches it is scope creep during the build, which is why what is excluded gets written down at the start.
Can we raise investment on an MVP?
Investors respond to evidence, and a live product with real usage is far stronger evidence than a prototype. What matters is not how polished it is but whether it demonstrates that people want the thing.
A brief makes quotes comparable. Build one in a few minutes and send it wherever you like — including nowhere near us.