Short answer: an MVP costs about $10,000 to $25,000 (roughly £8,000 to £20,000) for a lean first version built on proven components, $25,000 to $60,000 (roughly £20,000 to £48,000) for an investor-ready product with accounts, a custom backend and integrations, and $60,000 upwards when the core idea itself is technically hard. Most teams overspend because they build version two before anyone has used version one.
An MVP is not a cheap version of your product. It is the smallest thing you can put in front of real users that proves or kills your riskiest assumption. Get that distinction right and the budget question mostly answers itself, because everything that does not test the assumption comes out of scope.
Below are the real ranges for 2026, what drives them, and what you can safely cut from a first version without damaging the test.
What actually counts as an MVP
An MVP has one job: to produce evidence. Evidence that people want the thing, that they will pay for it, or that the hard technical part works.
That means a genuine MVP usually has one core workflow, one type of user, and enough polish that people take it seriously. It does not have settings pages, admin dashboards, multiple pricing tiers, an onboarding tour, a mobile app and a web app, or a feature you added because a competitor has it.
If you cannot describe what would make you abandon the idea after launch, you are not building an MVP. You are building a product on a hunch and calling it an MVP because it sounds disciplined.
MVP development cost by type
| MVP type | What it includes | Typical cost (USD) | Typical cost (GBP) | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No-code or low-code | Assembled from existing tools, no custom backend, limited by the platform | $3,000 to $12,000 | £2,400 to £9,600 | 2 to 5 weeks |
| Lean custom build | One workflow, login, a handful of screens, one integration | $10,000 to $25,000 | £8,000 to £20,000 | 6 to 10 weeks |
| Investor-ready product | Accounts and roles, custom backend, payments, two or three integrations, basic analytics | $25,000 to $60,000 | £20,000 to £48,000 | 3 to 5 months |
| Technically hard MVP | The core idea is the hard part: AI, real-time, hardware, heavy data or regulation | $60,000 to $150,000 | £48,000 to £120,000 | 4 to 8 months |
These are industry-typical ranges for 2026. A lean custom build sits roughly at the bottom of the band covered in our web app development cost guide, because an MVP is normally a focused first version of a web application.
What drives the price
Number of user types. One user type is one set of screens and one set of permissions. Adding an admin, a manager and a customer roughly triples the surface area before you have added a single feature.
Integrations. Every external system is an unknown until someone reads its documentation. A well-documented payment provider is a day. An old system with no API and a spreadsheet export is two weeks and a bad mood.
Data complexity. Simple records are cheap. Anything with versioning, permissions per field, audit trails or complex relationships is not.
Design. A template-based interface is fast and perfectly acceptable for a first test. A distinctive designed product costs more and is occasionally worth it, if you are selling into a market where the interface is the product.
Compliance. Health, finance and anything holding sensitive personal data carries requirements that cannot be deferred to version two. If you are in one of those markets, budget for it from day one.
Platform count. Web only is one build. Web plus native mobile is close to two, unless you use a cross-platform framework, which our Flutter vs React Native comparison covers.
What you can safely cut from version one
This is where the money is. Almost every MVP quote can be reduced by a third by removing the following, and in most cases nobody notices for six months.
- Admin dashboards. You can administer early users from the database or a spreadsheet. Build the admin panel when doing it by hand starts to hurt.
- Settings and preferences. Pick sensible defaults. Every toggle is a branch of logic that has to be built, tested and supported.
- Multiple pricing tiers. One price tests willingness to pay. Three tiers tests nothing and triples the billing logic.
- Automated onboarding. Onboard your first fifty users personally. You will learn more from those conversations than from any analytics dashboard.
- Notifications in every channel. Pick one channel. Email is usually enough at the start.
- Full test coverage of secondary paths. Test the core workflow properly, accept manual checks elsewhere, and be honest that this is a debt you will repay if the product survives.
- Scale engineering. Building for a hundred thousand users before you have ten is the most expensive form of optimism in software.
What you cannot cut: authentication done properly, a way to take money if you are charging, basic analytics so you can see what people actually did, and enough error handling that a failure does not look like a scam.
How long it takes
A lean custom MVP is six to ten weeks of build. Around that, allow one to two weeks of scoping before, and expect a few weeks after launch of fixing what real usage exposes. Anyone quoting a two-week MVP is either assembling no-code tools, which is a legitimate approach, or has not understood the scope.
We work in two-week sprints, which means you see working software from the first fortnight rather than at the end. That matters more on an MVP than on any other kind of project, because the point is to learn early, and you cannot learn from a status report.
Fixed price or time and materials
Fixed price suits an MVP where the scope is genuinely locked and the requirements are clear. You get budget certainty. The trade is that changes cost extra, and on a product where you are deliberately learning as you go, changes are the point.
Time and materials suits discovery-heavy work. You get flexibility and you carry the risk.
The practical answer for most MVPs is a fixed-price discovery that produces a specification and a real number, followed by a fixed-price build against that specification. You pay a small amount to remove the uncertainty before committing the larger budget.
How MVP budgets get wasted
Building for a year before showing anyone. The longer you go without contact with a user, the more of the budget is spent on guesses.
Rewriting before launch. Choosing a new framework mid-build, or rebuilding a working component because it is not elegant enough, on a product nobody has used yet.
Hiring for scale on day one. A full team on a product with no users burns the runway that was supposed to fund the iteration after launch.
Treating the MVP as the finished product. Plan for roughly the same again after launch, because the version that works is almost always version three.
Perfecting the parts users never see. Admin tooling and internal reporting can be ugly for a long time.
Bottom line
A focused MVP at $10,000 to $25,000 that reaches real users in two months is worth more than a $60,000 product that launches in nine and answers the same question. Decide what would prove you wrong, build only what tests it, and keep enough budget for the version you write after you have learned something.
Book a free call and we will scope your MVP down to what actually needs building, then give you a fixed price and a date.