Every founder asks some version of the same question before writing a single line of a spec: what's this actually going to cost? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on how much of the product is genuinely 'minimum' versus how much has quietly turned into a wishlist — and most of the budget conversations we have end up being about scope, not rate.
A true MVP — one core workflow, authentication, a database, and a clean UI around it — typically lands in the low-to-mid thousands of dollars when built on a modern stack like Next.js with a managed database and auth provider rather than custom-built infrastructure. The cost driver isn't the framework, it's how many edge cases and secondary features get pulled into 'version one'.
Where budgets actually go: roughly a third into the core data model and backend logic, a third into the UI and the interactions that make it feel like a real product rather than a form, and the remainder into auth, payments (if applicable), and deployment. Skipping a design system at this stage, which we've written about before, is the single most common way early costs balloon later.
The features founders assume are 'small' are usually the ones that aren't: real-time updates, granular permissions, multi-tenant data isolation, and billing all sound like a checkbox but each carries real engineering weight. Naming these clearly during scoping — even if the answer is 'not in v1' — is what keeps a fixed quote fixed.
The other lever is speed to a testable product. We default new builds to a modern, server-rendered stack specifically because it cuts weeks off the path from spec to something real users can click through, which matters more for an MVP than almost any other consideration — a technically impressive but six-month-late MVP has already lost the point of being minimum.
If you're scoping an MVP right now, the most useful exercise isn't listing features — it's listing the one workflow a user has to complete for the product to have proven anything, and building only that, well.