SHORT ANSWER
A focused software MVP costs roughly £5,000–£15,000 built with AI-assisted tooling and a small scope, £20,000–£50,000 with a freelance or agency team, and £60,000–£120,000 for a complex or regulated product. The main cost driver is scope, not day rate: every extra flow adds design, build, testing and support cost. Budget 20% for post-launch iteration — that is where the learning is.
Answered by Andrew Crossley, Fractional Chief Product Officer · Updated 2026-08-01
Founders budget for the build and forget the iteration. A launched MVP with no money left to respond to what it teaches you is a wasted experiment.
Quoted ranges vary tenfold because scope varies tenfold. Comparing quotes without comparing scope is meaningless.
Price each user flow separately. Founders are shocked how much of the budget sits in admin, billing and settings screens nobody asked for.
Hosting, model inference, email, monitoring and support cost money monthly. Budget twelve months of run cost up front.
Hold back 20-30%. Spending 100% on v1 leaves nothing for the version the data asks for.
AI-assisted solo build is cheapest and fastest for simple products; an agency buys capacity but rarely product judgement; a fractional product lead plus a small build team is the middle path.
FROM EXPERIENCE
£8,000: one flow, AI-assisted build, managed infrastructure, live in five weeks, aimed purely at proving demand with paying pilot users.
£35,000: two flows plus payments and light admin, small contract team with product leadership, eight to ten weeks, aimed at a seed raise with usage evidence.
£90,000: multi-role product with integrations and compliance requirements — at this level, validate hard before committing, because the cost of being wrong is a full runway cycle.
Yes, if the scope is genuinely one flow and you use no-code or AI-assisted tooling. Complexity, not ambition, is what breaks that budget.
For a validation MVP, very little — you should be reaching users directly. Paid acquisition is a post-PMF cost.
For capacity, sometimes. For product decisions, no. Agencies build what you specify; the specification is the risky part.
IN SHORT
Free estimate of what your MVP will cost and how long it will take.
Read moreAI-accelerated MVP delivery, scoped to one journey that earns.
Read moreDone-for-you six-week build from validated idea to live product.
Read moreA validated, instrumented first product in front of real users.
Idea to MVP in six weeksTHE FRAMEWORK
MORE ANSWERS
Build an MVP by picking one job a specific user will pay to have done, designing the single shortest flow that completes it, and shipping only that. Validate demand before building — interviews plus a paid or committed signal. Build in four to six weeks with off-the-shelf infrastructure, launch to a narrow group, and measure whether they complete the job and come back.
Build an AI MVP by choosing one task where being right 80% of the time is still useful, wrapping a hosted model rather than training your own, and designing the interface around correction — users must be able to see, edit and accept output. Set an evaluation set before launch, measure task success and human-override rate, and only consider fine-tuning once the workflow itself is proven.
A focused MVP goes from idea to launched product in six to twelve weeks: one to two weeks of discovery and validation, four to six weeks of build, one to two weeks of pilot and fixes. Complex, integrated or regulated products take four to nine months. Delays almost always come from scope changes and slow decisions, not from engineering speed.