"MVP" has become a word for everything: a landing page with a waitlist, a prototype exported from a design tool, a half-finished platform that ran out of money. Ask five agencies to build you one and you'll get five quotes for five different things.
Here's the definition we've worked with since 2017: an MVP is one core journey, fully built, in front of real users. Not a little of everything — all of one thing.
This piece covers what that costs, which shortcuts come back to bite, and how you'll know your MVP is done. With the same numbers that sit on our public price list.
All of one thing
The most common MVP mistake isn't too much thrift — it's the wrong kind of thrift. Building ten features to 60 percent instead of one to 100. The result demos well and can be given to nobody.
An example from our portfolio: HappyBee shows parents what their children eat at school — weekly menus, nutrition, per child. One purpose, one user group. Today: 84% parent activation across 120+ schools, 71% fewer allergen queries. The case study is here.
That's the shape most ventures should start in. A product that does one thing right. Extending comes later, on a clean base — the other way round works too, it's just more expensive.
What an MVP costs
From our price list, unchanged:
| Project shape | Team | Duration | Indicative band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lean MVP — one core journey, in front of real users fast | 2–3 engineers | 8–14 weeks | $30,000–55,000 |
Everything a first production-ready release needs is in there: architecture, design, development, QA, release. Not a click-through prototype — a product real users use with real data.
Why US dollars? Because an exchange rate I fixed months ago lies. Swiss clients get their quote in francs, from the same price list — our Swiss cost guide has the CHF framing, and our cost calculator runs your specific shape in two minutes.
And as always: Indicative 2026 bands, not a quote. What moves the number is complexity — integrations, compliance, data migration and the reliability bar you need on day one. Every engagement is priced fixed and in writing after a paid discovery sprint, and the sprint is credited in full against the build.
The shortcuts that come back to bite
An MVP lives by leaving things out. But there are two kinds of leaving out, and the bill arrives with the wrong one.
What you should never cut:
- Login, permissions, data-protection basics. "We'll harden it later" means, in practice, you build it twice. We build privacy-first, with GDPR and the nDSG considered from day one — retrofitting is always dearer than building in.
- An admin surface. Without one, your developer answers every support question with a database query. A simple one is fine — but it has to exist.
- The architecture decisions that can't be retrofitted. Multi-tenancy is the classic — why "we'll add it later" is the most expensive sentence in SaaS is here.
- Measurement. An MVP is an experiment. An experiment without metrics is an opinion with a budget.
What you can safely cut:
- The polished design system — a clean, plain UI serves the first cohort fine.
- Integrations two through ten. One integration that holds beats five halves.
- Separate native apps per platform — cross-platform is the default road now, it's how we build mobile products.
- Any feature whose sentence starts with "And later users could also…"
How you'll know it's done
An MVP isn't done when nothing is missing. It's done when a stranger completes the core journey without your help — and you can measure what they did.
Which is why one sentence belongs before the first sprint, and many projects never write it: "This MVP succeeds if number X goes from A to B by date C." When that sentence is missing, the gap isn't technical. It's a decision nobody has made.
And after? Version 2 gets built from usage data, not from the original ideas list. Annual support typically runs at 15–20% of the original build cost — that's on the public price list too, because the second bill shouldn't be a surprise.
The sober way in
If you're seriously weighing an MVP: the first workshop and a rough assessment cost nothing and usually come back within three working days. Then comes the paid discovery sprint — out of it you get a written scope, an architecture, a costed roadmap and an explicit "won't build" list. The document is yours to keep, even if you build with someone else afterwards.
First know what's being built. Then a number that holds.
