"How much will my MVP cost?" is usually the second question a founder asks, right after "how long will it take?" Both have the same honest answer: it depends far more on decisions you haven't made yet than on which developer or agency you hire.

I've scoped enough of these conversations to have a real range in my head, and enough of them to know where that range actually comes from. So here's the breakdown, not just the number.

The 2026 range, roughly

For a single, well-defined MVP built by a small studio or an experienced freelancer, current market pricing runs somewhere between $10,000 and $150,000+. That's an uncomfortably wide range to be handed when you're trying to set a budget, so here's what actually sits at each end of it:

  • $10K-$25K — a single-feature product on a no-code platform like Bubble: one core workflow, one user type, minimal integrations, an off-the-shelf design system dressed up in your brand.
  • $25K-$60K — a multi-feature product with a couple of user roles, a handful of third-party integrations (payments, auth, maybe a CRM or analytics tool), and custom UI design. Most MVPs that actually need to impress an investor or a first cohort of paying users land here — and this is still comfortably Bubble territory for most cases.
  • $60K-$150K+ — a product that needs real scale, regulatory compliance, or heavy AI and real-time features from day one. This is where custom code on something like Next.js and Supabase starts to earn its cost: more integrations, more edge cases, more QA, and infrastructure decisions that have to be right the first time.

One thing worth knowing before you assume a quote is too good or too bad: where a studio is based changes this picture more than people expect. An India-based, founder-led studio typically lands well under what a comparable US or UK agency would quote for identical scope — not because corners get cut, but because the underlying cost structure (salaries, overhead, office space) is genuinely different. Cheaper doesn't automatically mean lower quality; it's worth asking what's actually driving the number down before you assume either way.

Scope is the real cost driver, not the platform

If I had to name the single biggest reason an MVP budget blows past its estimate, it isn't the tech stack. It's scope creep — the MVP quietly turning into the full product before it has shipped once.

It happens gradually and for reasonable-sounding reasons. A stakeholder wants "just one more" role type. Someone remembers a competitor has a settings page, so now you need one too. The admin dashboard that was supposed to be a Supabase table view becomes its own mini-application. None of these individually feels like scope creep — each one is a small, defensible addition. Collectively, they're the difference between a $20K build and a $70K build that took three times as long to ship.

The fix isn't a stricter contract. It's scoping ruthlessly against one question: what is the smallest version of this that actually tests the assumption you're trying to validate? Not the smallest version of the full product — the smallest thing that answers "does anyone want this." Everything else is a v2 feature, however tempting it is to build now while you're already in the codebase.

Platform and stack: the second-biggest lever

Once scope is fixed, the platform you build on is the next thing that moves the number meaningfully — and it's a decision worth making deliberately rather than defaulting to whatever you're more comfortable with.

Bubble (or another mature no-code platform) gets you to a working, testable product faster and cheaper than custom code, for the vast majority of MVPs. The workflows, database, and UI are all visual, which means less raw engineering time per feature. The catch — and it's a real one — is that a Bubble app's long-term performance depends almost entirely on how the data structure and workflows were built early on. A rushed data model is the actual reason "Bubble apps get slow," not Bubble itself; built properly, they happily serve thousands of users.

Custom code (Next.js, Supabase, or similar) costs more upfront because every screen, workflow, and integration is written rather than assembled. What you get in return is full ownership of the code, no platform-specific ceiling on performance or customization, and an architecture you control completely. This is the right call when you already know people want this and the open question is whether it can scale — not when the open question is still "does anyone want this at all."

Getting this call wrong is expensive in both directions: building custom when you only needed to validate an idea burns months and budget you didn't need to spend, and building on no-code when you already knew you needed custom-grade performance means paying for a migration later that you could have avoided.

The line items people forget to budget for

A few cost drivers show up in almost every scoping conversation, and they're worth naming explicitly because they're easy to leave out of a first mental estimate:

  • Integrations. Every third-party service you connect — payments, email, SMS, a CRM, an existing internal tool — adds setup time, error handling, and testing that's easy to undercount. A product with three integrations is not simply three times the work of one integration; each one adds its own edge cases.
  • Design. A clean, credible interface is not free, even on a platform with built-in components. Budget for it as its own line item, not as something that happens automatically alongside development.
  • AI features, if any. Adding a chatbot, a generative content pipeline, or genuine agentic behavior (an AI that plans multi-step actions and calls tools on its own) is a meaningfully different scope than a static form-and-database app. It's usually worth scoping as close to its own mini-project, with its own budget line, rather than folding it into a general "and also add AI" ask.
  • Post-launch iteration. The first version rarely survives contact with real users unchanged. Whatever your build budget is, plan for a second, smaller round of changes once you have actual usage data — not as a failure of the first build, but as the normal next step.

What to actually do with this range

If you take one thing from this: don't start the conversation by asking "how much does an MVP cost" as if there's a single answer waiting to be told to you. Start by writing down, as specifically as you can, the one thing you need to learn from this MVP — and then scope backward from that, ruthlessly, before you ever get to a platform or a price.

A good scoping conversation should leave you with a number you understand, not just a number you were quoted. If a quote comes back and you can't explain to yourself why it's the size it is — which features are driving the top end, which platform assumption is driving the bottom — that's worth pushing on before you sign anything, whoever you end up building with.