Almost every founder we talk to asks some version of the same question before a single line of the spec gets written: what's this actually going to cost? The honest answer depends entirely on how much of the product is genuinely "minimum," versus how much has quietly turned into a wishlist — and most of our budget conversations end up being about scope, not hourly rate.
What a real MVP costs
A true MVP — one core workflow, authentication, a database, and a clean UI wrapped around it — typically lands in the low-to-mid thousands of dollars when it's built on a modern stack like Next.js with a managed database and auth provider, rather than fully custom infrastructure. The framework isn't the cost driver. The number of edge cases and secondary features that get pulled into "version one" is.
Where the money actually goes
Roughly a third goes into the core data model and backend logic. Another third goes into the UI and the small interactions that make something feel like a real product rather than a form with buttons. The rest covers auth, payments if you need them, and deployment. Skipping a design system at this stage — something we've written about separately — is the single most common way early costs quietly balloon later.
The features founders assume are small are usually exactly the ones that aren't. Real-time updates, granular permissions, multi-tenant data isolation, billing — each sounds like a checkbox and each carries real engineering weight. Naming these explicitly during scoping, even when the answer is "not in v1," is what keeps a fixed quote actually fixed.
Speed matters more than people expect
The other real lever is how fast you get to something testable. We default new builds to a modern, server-rendered stack specifically because it shaves weeks off the path from spec to a product real users can click through — and that matters more for an MVP than almost anything else. A technically impressive MVP that's six months late has already lost the entire point of being minimum.
Whether you're building this in the US, the UK, or anywhere else, the same rule holds: if you're scoping a SaaS MVP right now, don't start by listing features. Start by naming the one workflow a user has to complete for the product to have proven anything — and price out only that, properly.