The five price bands you'll encounter
Every quote you get for an MVP will land in roughly one of five bands, and understanding the band is more useful than staring at a specific number.
Band 1 — Solo freelance developer, offshore: Roughly US$3,000 to US$8,000. Cheap because one person delivers everything, usually without a review loop. Fine for a proof of concept nobody will touch again; risky for anything you want to build on.
Band 2 — Solo freelance developer, senior, onshore: Roughly US$10,000 to US$25,000. You get quality but you also get one person's availability, which is often the bottleneck when you're trying to hit a demo date.
Band 3 — Boutique agency: Roughly US$25,000 to US$80,000. You get project management, design, code review — and the overhead that comes with three-to-five people billing hours against your project.
Band 4 — Large agency: US$80,000 and up, often much higher. Overkill for a first MVP. You're paying for enterprise-scale delivery process on a scope that doesn't need it.
Band 5 — AI-assisted fixed-price delivery: Our category. Complexity-scored fixed prices that typically compress a Band 2 outcome into a Band 1 timeline — because AI does the mechanical scaffolding while senior developers spend their hours on judgement work.
Where the money actually goes
The single biggest cost driver is not "features" — it's complexity. Two apps with the same visible feature count can differ five-fold in build cost. Complexity is driven by:
- Core data entities. A blog has one entity. A marketplace has five to eight. Each entity needs CRUD, permissions, edge cases.
- Third-party integrations. Every integration is at least half a day of hardening. Stripe alone is two.
- User roles. Two roles (guest + user) is trivial. Four roles with row-level permissions is meaningful engineering.
- Non-trivial flows. Multi-step onboarding, dispute resolution, refund windows, delayed jobs — each is a full feature disguised as a single line in a wireframe.
Two easy ways to overspend
1. Paying for polish before validation. Any budget spent on animations, custom illustrations, or bespoke UI micro-interactions before you've talked to ten users is money burned. Save it for after you know the product-market-fit signal.
2. Buying scope you don't need yet. Admin dashboards, referral systems, marketing analytics — most of these can be added post-launch in a week. Cutting them from the initial scope frequently halves the price.
How much you should actually budget
For a testable, senior-reviewed MVP in 2026, the working number is the equivalent of two months of a mid-level developer's salary in your local market. Below that, you're taking real quality risk. Well above that, you're paying either for scope beyond an MVP or for agency process on a project that doesn't need it.
The fastest way to a real answer for your idea is to run it through the builder. You'll get the complexity score, the recommended package, and the locked price in under five minutes — no sign-up, no card.