What an MVP Actually Costs in 2026 (With Real Numbers)

I've built MVPs for marketplace founders, SaaS startups, and solo entrepreneurs. I've also seen the quotes they got before they came to me. So let me give you the honest numbers — not the "it depends" hedge you'll get from most developers.

The Three Options

Option 1: Solo Developer / Freelancer (£15-50k)

This is my world. You hire one experienced developer who handles everything — architecture, backend, frontend, deployment, the lot. The range is wide because scope varies wildly. A simple booking platform with payments might be £15-20k. A two-sided marketplace with real-time messaging, verification pipelines, and payment splits? That's pushing £40-50k.

For context, TidyLinker — a full two-sided marketplace for professional cleaners with Stripe Connect payments, verification workflows, messaging, admin panel, and 15 service types — took four months. That's in the £20-50k budget range. And that's a proper marketplace, not a landing page with a contact form.

The upside of a solo developer: direct communication, no project manager tax, fast decisions. The downside: single point of failure. If they get hit by a bus or just ghost you (it happens), you're stuck.

Option 2: Agency (£50-150k)

Agencies charge more because they've got overhead — project managers, designers, multiple developers, office space, account managers. You're paying for the machine, not just the output.

Some of that overhead is genuinely useful. A good agency will give you proper project management, design work, and QA testing. A bad agency will give you a junior developer doing the actual work while a project manager sends you status updates that say nothing.

The agency model works well for founders who want to be hands-off. You describe what you want, they deliver it. In theory. In practice, I've seen agencies produce worse output than a competent solo developer because the person writing the code is the most junior person on the team.

I've worked as a white-label developer for agencies for over a decade. I know how the sausage gets made. Sometimes the "team of experts" is one senior dev (me) and a project manager relaying messages.

Option 3: Offshore (£10-30k)

Look, I'm not going to be a snob about this. There are brilliant developers everywhere in the world. But the cheap offshore model — where you're paying £15-25/hour through an outsourcing firm — has consistent problems.

Communication overhead kills you. Time zones mean async communication, which means decisions that take 5 minutes in a call take 3 days over Slack. Cultural differences in how "done" is defined cause endless friction. And the developer you interviewed isn't always the developer writing your code.

The Rezzy project came to me after exactly this pattern. The founder had a vibe-coded prototype that an agency quoted six figures to fix. The original build had 22 database tables where 10 would do, 1,000-line components, no tests, broken email queues, and dead code everywhere. The "cheap" option turned out to be the most expensive one.

What Actually Drives Cost Up

1. Unclear requirements

This is the single biggest cost driver and it's entirely in your control. If you come to me and say "I want an Airbnb for dog walkers" — that's not a requirement, that's a vibes pitch. How do dog walkers set availability? How do payments work? Who handles disputes? What happens if a walker cancels last minute?

Every unanswered question becomes a decision the developer has to make. And developers making business decisions is how you end up with a product that technically works but makes no sense for your users.

2. Authentication and user types

Every additional user type roughly doubles complexity. A simple app with one user type is straightforward. A marketplace with buyers, sellers, and admins? That's three sets of dashboards, three sets of permissions, three sets of notifications.

3. Payments

Simple Stripe Checkout? Not too bad. Marketplace payments with splits, escrow, refunds, and KYC verification? That's weeks of work. The business logic around money is always more complex than founders expect. More on this in my article about marketplace payments.

4. "Can we just add..."

The four most expensive words in software development. Each "small" addition interacts with everything else. A "simple" messaging feature needs: real-time updates, read receipts, notification emails, mobile push notifications, moderation tools, and probably file sharing. That "simple" feature is 2-4 weeks of work.

What Founders Waste Money On

Custom design before validating the idea. You don't need a bespoke design system for your MVP. Use a component library. Make it look clean and professional, but don't spend £10k on design before you know if anyone wants your product.

Features nobody asked for. Build the core loop first. If your marketplace connects cleaners with clients, you need: signup, profiles, search, booking, payment. You don't need a blog, a referral system, an affiliate programme, gamification, or AI-powered recommendations. Not yet.

The wrong tech stack. Don't let a developer talk you into microservices, Kubernetes, and a headless CMS when you've got zero users. A monolith on a £20/month server will handle more traffic than you'll see in your first year. Scale when you need to, not before.

Rebuilding what exists. Authentication, email sending, file uploads, PDF generation — all of these have battle-tested solutions. Every hour your developer spends building something that already exists as a library or service is an hour wasted.

My Honest Recommendation

If you've got a clear idea and £20-40k, hire a senior freelancer. Not the cheapest one. The one who asks you uncomfortable questions about your business model before writing a single line of code.

If you've got £50k+ and want to be hands-off, a good agency can work. But vet them hard. Ask for code samples. Talk to their developers directly, not just the sales team.

If you've got less than £15k, you're probably not ready for custom development. Use no-code tools to validate the concept first. Seriously. There's no shame in a Bubble prototype or a Webflow site with Zapier automations to prove people will pay for what you're offering.

The best money you'll spend isn't on code. It's on clarity — knowing exactly what you're building and why, before anyone opens an editor.

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If you're ready to start planning your MVP with someone who'll give you straight answers about cost and scope, I offer free initial consultations. No pitch, just an honest conversation about what your idea would actually take to build.