Founders come to us with quotes ranging from £5,000 to £150,000 — for the same one-paragraph idea. The spread isn't dishonesty. It's that “MVP” means five different products depending on who you ask, and the quote reflects which one the provider heard. Here's how to decode it.
What you're actually paying for
An MVP build is roughly five chunks of work. Every quote includes some of them; almost no quote names them:
- Discovery and architecture — turning your paragraph into a build plan: what's in v1, what's deliberately not, what the data model looks like. Skipping this doesn't save money; it defers the cost to the rebuild.
- The core feature — the thing your product actually does. Usually 30–40% of the work, to most founders' surprise.
- The plumbing — accounts, login, password reset, payments, emails, admin. Undifferentiated, unavoidable, and where cheap builds cut corners you can't see until they leak.
- Infrastructure — hosting, deployment pipelines, backups, monitoring. The difference between a demo and a product someone can pay for at 2am.
- The first month after launch — bug fixes, small pivots from real user feedback. If the quote ends at launch day, it's not a product quote; it's a demo quote.
The real price bands (UK, 2026)
No-code prototype — £2,000–£5,000.
Bubble, Glide, or a thin AI-built app. Genuinely useful for testing whether anyone wants the thing. Not a foundation — treat it as a disposable experiment and it's money well spent. Treat it as v1 and you'll pay for it twice.
Solo freelancer — £5,000–£15,000.
Can be excellent value with the right person. The honest risks: bus-factor of one, variable plumbing quality, and nobody reviewing the work. If you go this route, pay a second senior engineer for a one-day review before launch — it's the best £500 in this article.
Small senior team — £15,000–£30,000.
Two or three experienced engineers who've built SaaS before: proper architecture, tested plumbing, real infrastructure, and someone still answering in month two. This is where we work — most TechChaps MVP builds land £5k–£30k depending on scope, with cloud platform work running £20k–£80k.
Full agency — £30,000–£80,000+.
You're paying for process, project managers and polish. Worth it at enterprise scale; usually overkill for a first version — you can buy a lot of iteration with the £40k difference.
What moves the price most
Not the number of pages. These do:
- Integrations — every third-party system (payments, CRMs, legacy APIs) adds real cost. The second payment provider costs more than the first.
- Multi-tenancy — “each customer gets their own workspace” is one sentence that can double a build.
- Compliance — handling health, financial or children's data changes the engineering floor.
- “Like X but simpler” — X has 200 engineers. The word simpler is doing more work in that sentence than any budget can.
How to keep the cost down without wrecking the product
Cut scope, never plumbing. Ship one workflow done properly instead of five done thinly — you can add features to a sound foundation, but you can't add a sound foundation to features. And insist on seeing something running by week two or three; long silences are how £15k becomes £40k.
Have an idea and a number in mind? Tell us about it — a 20-minute call and you'll leave knowing which band your idea is in, and what we'd cut to hit your budget. If the right answer is “start with the no-code version”, that's what you'll hear.
