Service
MVP development
A working first version of your product — accounts, billing, and an admin view — shipped in weeks and priced before the first call.
MVP development is the work of turning a product idea into a version real users can sign up for, pay for, and complain about. The deliverable is not a prototype or a clickable mock — it is a deployed product on your own domain, with authentication, your core workflow, billing if you charge from day one, and an admin view so you can see what users actually do. The point of an MVP is to buy evidence cheaply, so scope discipline is most of the job: we build the loop that tests your riskiest assumption and defer everything that doesn't.
Our default way of building one is AI-first — what we call vibecoding. AI writes the first draft of the standard parts: the auth flows, the CRUD screens, the billing integration, the admin table nobody wants to hand-type. Senior engineers review every line, harden the edges, and hand-build the parts that are genuinely novel in your product, because that part has no template. The result prices at roughly half of what the same scope costs us to build by hand, and the estimator on this site shows both numbers side by side rather than asking you to take that on faith.
Pricing is the same wherever you are. We work remotely with founders across the US, hold overlap hours on your timezone, and demo working software weekly — so the number the estimator gives you in two minutes is the number we mean, whether you're in San Francisco or Chicago. The city pages under this service exist because the honest comparison is local: what our fixed remote price looks like next to your city's hourly rates, agency minimums, and the cost of a first engineering hire.
Every engagement ships from your accounts — your repository, your cloud, your Stripe — so there is nothing to migrate away from us later and no leverage held over your product. What's included and what's explicitly not included is listed on every cost page, because the fastest way to lose a founder's trust is a surprise in week three.
What it costs
A typical scope prices at $9,000–$13,000 built AI-first and ships in 5–7 weeks — here is the same scope under all three approaches, from the estimator's public constants.
Vibecoding
$9,000–$13,000
5–7 weeks
Hybrid
$12,000–$17,500
7–9 weeks
Traditional
$16,000–$23,500
11–13 weeks
Lean
Prove the core loop with accounts and an admin view — charge customers manually until the loop is proven.
$6,500–$9,500
Standard
The configuration most funded MVPs start with: accounts, billing, and an admin panel on a custom interface.
$9,000–$13,000
Ambitious
Billing, notifications, and analytics on web and mobile, under a full design system.
$18,500–$26,500
What's in the price — and what isn't
Included in every engagement
-
Scoping call and a written build plan
One call to pin scope, then a plan that lists what ships, in what order, with the estimator configuration attached.
-
Senior engineer review of every line
AI writes first drafts; a senior engineer reads, corrects, and hardens all of it before it reaches your branch.
-
Your accounts, your ownership
Code lives in your GitHub, runs on your cloud and your Stripe from day one. You own all of it outright.
-
Weekly working demos
A deployed build you can click every week — progress is shown, not described.
-
Tests on the paths that can lose money
Automated tests cover billing, auth, and your core workflow. Not every line — the lines that hurt.
-
Deployment pipeline and handover
Staging and production environments, one-command deploys, and a recorded walkthrough of the codebase.
Explicitly not included
-
Third-party service fees
Stripe, hosting, email, and API providers bill you directly on your accounts. Typical MVP infra runs tens of dollars a month, not hundreds.
-
Ongoing maintenance
Post-launch support is priced separately in the estimator (1 or 3 months). Without it, the engagement ends at handover.
-
Brand identity and marketing site
Design depth covers the product's UI. Logos, brand systems, and multi-page marketing sites are separate work.
-
Compliance certification
We build with sane security defaults, but SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI audit work is its own project and priced as one.
-
Legacy data migration
Moving data out of an existing system is scoped separately once we've seen the system.
MVP development cost, city by city
The price is the same everywhere we work — these guides put it next to each city's own market rates, agency floors, and hiring costs, with sources.
Common questions
How long does an MVP take to build?
Four to ten weeks for most scopes, and the estimator shows the timeline for yours before any call. The spread depends on the same choices that move price: feature modules, platform, and how much runs in parallel.
Who owns the code?
You do, from the first commit. Work happens in your GitHub organization and deploys to your cloud accounts, so ending the engagement never means recovering your own product from someone else's infrastructure.
What do you need from me to start?
A clear picture of the one workflow your product must prove, and about two hours a week. One scoping call sets the plan; after that your time goes to weekly demos and decisions, not project management.
What happens after launch?
Either a support retainer — one or three months, priced in the estimator — or a clean handover. Handover includes the deploy pipeline, docs, and a recorded codebase walkthrough, so a future hire or team can pick the product up without us.
Can you work with a codebase that already exists?
Yes, after a short paid review of the code. Existing codebases vary too much for a form to price honestly, so the estimator covers new builds and the review sets the number for takeovers.
Why is the price a range and not a fixed number?
Because scope discovered on the first call moves real numbers in both directions, and pretending otherwise produces change-order fights later. The range spans ±18% around the estimate; the number we commit to after scoping sits inside it.