Disclosure: This article reflects our own portfolio data and pricing. We don’t earn commissions from any tools, partners, or services mentioned.
In the last six months, we’ve shipped MVPs at €18k, €40k, €100k, €160k, and €350k. Every single one was the right answer for the founder who paid for it. None of them was over-priced. None of them was under-priced. They were just at different tiers of complexity, for different stages of business, solving genuinely different problems.
That’s the answer to “how much does an MVP cost?” — and almost nobody publishes it. Search the question and you’ll find dozens of agency blog posts giving you a range of $10,000 to $150,000 with generic tiers labelled “simple,” “medium,” and “complex,” followed by a button that says “get a quote.” That’s content marketing pretending to be guidance. It’s not useful for the founder actually trying to plan a budget.
This piece is our attempt to be useful instead. We’ll walk through five real tiers of MVP investment, anchored in projects we’ve actually shipped, with the euro figures, timelines, and the type of business each one was right for. We’ll cover the new vibe-coded “Tier 0” that didn’t exist three years ago. We’ll show you the funding math investors use. And at the end, we’ll cover where Altar sits on the price spectrum and why.
A quick note on currency. Our numbers are in euros because we’re based in Portugal. Convert at roughly €1 = $1.07–$1.10 depending on the day. The order-of-magnitude logic doesn’t change.
Contents
At a glance
| Tier | Investment | Typical timeline | What it buys you | Right call when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 0 Vibe-coded prototype | €0–€5k of credit burn | A few weekends | A deployed prototype to test “do users want this at all?” | Pre-funding, pre-validation. You genuinely don’t know if the idea has legs. |
| Tier 1 Lean validation MVP | €18k–€30k | ~2 months | A custom-built, properly-engineered product solving one core workflow. | You’ve validated demand, you’re pre-seed, and you have one workflow to nail. |
| Tier 2 Focused MVP | €40k–€60k | 3–5 months | A polished product with multiple flows, a few integrations, real UI. | One workflow, one user type, no real compliance exposure. |
| Tier 3 Standard founder MVP | €90k–€160k | 2–5 months | Real complexity: multiple roles, real integrations, serious business logic or data. | Fintech, regtech, healthtech, data-intensive B2B. Seed funding in play. |
| Tier 4 Enterprise / regulated MVP | €200k+ | 5+ months | A product that can stand up to enterprise procurement on day one. | First customer is a bank, insurer, or Fortune 500. Series A territory. |
Why “what does an MVP cost?” is the wrong question
The right question is: what does an MVP cost for a business at my stage, in my industry, with my regulatory exposure, that I can fund with the runway I actually have?
Five things drive the answer, in roughly this order of impact:
Complexity of the core logic. A marketplace with two-sided liquidity is not the same as a CRUD app. A platform that ingests five terabytes of new data a day is not the same as a Q&A community. We’ve shipped both. The first one in each pair costs three to ten times the second.
Data sensitivity and compliance. Healthcare, fintech, and any regulated industry add 25–40% to the build cost — not for features the user sees, but for encrypted storage, access logging, consent management, audit trails, and the kind of architecture that doesn’t get you sued. This is invisible work. It is also non-negotiable from day one if you’re handling money or medical data.
Integration count. Every third-party connection is a separate negotiation with someone else’s documentation, rate limits, and edge cases. A product with one Stripe integration is cheap. A product with Stripe, a regulator’s API, a notification service, a payments processor, and three external data sources is not.
Design ambition. A “good enough” UI built from a component library is fast and inexpensive. A custom-designed product where the experience is the differentiator costs noticeably more — and is sometimes the right call, especially in consumer.
Speed. Compressing a five-month build into two months means more people in parallel, which means more coordination cost, which means a higher total. Speed has a price.
You can move on any of these axes. You can’t pretend they don’t exist.
Tier 0: The vibe-coded prototype (€0–€5k of credit burn)
We covered this in detail in our comparison of Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit Agent, and Base44 — but it belongs in the cost conversation because in 2026 it’s a real option that didn’t exist a year ago.
A non-technical founder using Lovable’s Pro plan at €25/month plus disciplined prompting can ship a working, deployed, payment-taking web SaaS prototype in a few weekends. The actual cash cost is somewhere between €0 and a few hundred euros of credits. The hidden cost is your time and the quality ceiling — these tools get you to roughly 60–70% of a real product, after which the wall is steep.
What you’re really buying at this tier: the answer to “do users want this at all?” That’s an enormously valuable question to answer cheaply. Founders we talk to who used the time well at this tier — validating with real users, refining the value proposition, sometimes even taking first revenue — show up to the next conversation with a much sharper sense of what to build properly. Founders who used it badly show up with a prototype that looks impressive and answers no real questions.
Where this tier breaks down: anything that needs to scale, anything that handles meaningful data sensitivity, anything that needs proper auth and observability, anything mobile-native, and anything where the platform’s outage is your outage. (Base44’s three-hour platform-wide outage in February 2026 took every Base44-hosted app offline at once. Lovable’s 48-day exposure incident in early 2026 affected projects at the platform level. Building on someone else’s land has consequences.)
Right call when: you’re pre-funding, pre-validation, and you genuinely don’t know if the idea has legs. Burning €5k of credits to find out beats burning €50k of agency time to find out.
Wrong call when: you’ve already validated, you have funding, and you’re trying to scale on the prototype. The rebuild cost is almost always larger than what a clean Tier 2 or Tier 3 build would have been from the start.
Use Tier 0 with a deadline and a learning goal. If the goal is "get 20 users to try this and pay €5," that’s a great use of credits. If the goal is "build something that looks like a real company so I can raise money on it," you’ll waste both the credits and the runway. The point of vibe coding is to answer one question cheaply, not to perform funding-ready.
Tier 1: The lean validation MVP (€18k–€30k)
Two recent examples from our portfolio sit squarely in this tier.
The first was a niche two-sided marketplace built for a specific category of buyers and sellers. Two months, €18,000. The build was tightly scoped to the core liquidity loop: list, browse, transact, fulfill. Nothing more.
The second was a marketing technology platform — a SaaS letting fast-moving consumer goods companies build and manage personalised promotion campaigns across online and offline channels. Two months, €18,000. Same range, different industry, different complexity profile, but the same disciplined scope: solve one workflow well, prove the value, expand later.
What you’re really buying at this tier: a custom-built, properly-engineered application where the code is yours, the architecture won’t collapse under early users, and a developer can pick it up and extend it without a full rewrite. The polish is functional rather than ambitious. The integrations are minimal. The team you’re working with is small, senior, and disciplined about scope.
Where this tier breaks down: if your idea genuinely needs multiple integrations, several user roles, real-time notifications, a custom design system, and a dashboard for an admin user — this isn’t enough budget. Trying to fit a Tier 3 product into a Tier 1 budget is the most common cause of the “we ran out of money before we ran out of scope” problem.
Right call when: you’ve validated demand (often via Tier 0), you’re pre-seed or self-funded, and your product has one core workflow you need to nail before adding anything else. Lean consumer apps and single-purpose B2B tools sometimes fit here. Most don’t.
The fastest way to blow a Tier 1 budget is scope drift after kickoff. Before you sign anything, force yourself to write the MVP down in one sentence: "this product lets [user] do [action] in [context]." If you can’t, you don’t have a Tier 1 MVP — you have a Tier 2 or Tier 3 in disguise, and you should budget honestly.
Tier 2: The focused MVP (€40k–€60k)
A community management platform — a Q&A platform built for a specific professional industry — was a three-month build at €40,000. A gamified social network mobile app for fandom communities was a five-month build at €50,000.
What you’re really buying at this tier: a properly-designed product with multiple user flows, a handful of third-party integrations, decent UI polish, and the kind of foundation that can support meaningful early traction. Single-purpose product, focused scope, executed well.
Where this tier breaks down: as soon as you need real complexity — meaningful integrations, multi-role user management, regulatory exposure, or real-time data — you’ve outgrown the budget before the build is done. Most founders who try to fit a real B2B product into this range end up either cutting features they actually needed or going over budget mid-build.
Right call when: your product is genuinely focused on one workflow and one user type, you have a clear single integration path, and you don’t have meaningful compliance exposure. It’s the right tier for some products. It is not the default.
Most Tier 2 budgets get eaten by the second user role. If your product has an admin dashboard, a moderator view, or any "back-office" UI alongside the user-facing app, treat it as a 30–40% uplift on the build estimate. The work is often invisible until the developer starts costing it.
Tier 3: The standard founder MVP (€90k–€160k)
This is where the majority of our work lands, and it’s where most well-funded first-time founders should be budgeted. We mention it third because it sits in the middle of our portfolio, but in terms of frequency, this is the typical Altar engagement.
Recent examples include an API middleware connector — software letting non-technical users seamlessly integrate multiple third parties through a drag-and-drop interface — at five months and €90,000. A complex AI tool that analyses public rules on securities and advises front-office bankers on which products to recommend to which client profiles came in at two months, €100,000. A robust data ingestion system handling roughly five terabytes of new data per day, maintaining consistency, and serving immediate queries against the entire dataset was three months, €160,000.
What you’re really buying at this tier: a custom-built product with genuine complexity. Multiple user roles. Real third-party integrations done properly. Either substantial business logic, real-time or high-volume data processing, or meaningful security infrastructure — sometimes all three. The team is bigger, the architecture decisions are heavier, and the product scope phase before the build is substantial because the cost of getting it wrong is real.
If you read our case studies — and you should — most of the founder-led products you’ll find there started at this tier. The Swiss regtech that helps banks adapt to constantly-changing financial regulations, raised $8M on the back of its MVP launch, won the Swiss Fintech Award for Early Stage Startup of the Year, and stayed with us for two years before internalising. Not hard to figure out which one we mean if you look. The point isn’t the name; it’s that the trajectory from “founder with an idea” to “fundable company with traction” most often started with a Tier 3 build.
Where this tier breaks down: when the product genuinely requires enterprise-grade compliance from launch — multi-region data residency, full SOC 2, PCI-DSS, the works. That’s Tier 4.
Right call when: you’re in fintech, regtech, healthtech, or any data-intensive B2B category. When the architecture itself is part of your moat. When the product has more than one meaningful user role and a real integration footprint. When you have seed funding (or are about to raise on the back of this build) and the launch needs to credibly support that fundraise.
This is the tier most founders should be planning for. If your initial budget conversation puts you well below this and your product has any real complexity, you should either reduce scope honestly to fit Tier 1 or Tier 2, or raise more before you build.
At Tier 3, the product scope phase is the highest-leverage spend in the whole build. The euros you spend on getting the scope right are worth roughly ten times the euros you spend building the wrong thing well. If an agency wants to skip straight to development, that’s the signal to walk.
Tier 4: The enterprise or deeply regulated MVP (€200k+)
The largest recent example on our pricing page is an AI tool that analyses geographic data points to output forward-looking valuations of real estate assets across categories, types, and sizes. Five months, €350,000. The complexity here wasn’t a single dimension; it was every dimension at once. Multi-source data ingestion. Machine learning models. Complex domain logic. A user interface sophisticated enough for institutional users. Compliance posture appropriate for financial decision-making.
Another product in this tier — built in collaboration with a major global consultancy — addresses credit assessment for offline retailers. Same level of integration complexity, same compliance posture, same enterprise procurement realities.
What you’re really buying at this tier: a product that could credibly stand up to enterprise procurement on day one. Full SOC 2 alignment. Robust observability. Multi-environment deployment with proper segregation. The kind of build a Fortune 500 client would expect to see if they were going to depend on it for revenue-generating decisions.
Right call when: you’re an enterprise launching a satellite product, you’re a startup whose first customer is going to be a regulated buyer (a bank, insurer, healthcare system), or you’re a well-funded Series A company building the product that’s going to define the next stage of the business. We see this tier most often when the product itself is the company.
Products at this tier also often graduate into multi-year engagements that go far beyond the initial MVP. Some of our largest-ever builds, with cumulative investment well into seven figures over multiple years, started as Tier 4 launches. That’s a different conversation from the one most founders are having when they ask “what does an MVP cost?” — but it’s worth knowing the trajectory exists.
For Tier 4 builds, plan procurement onboarding in parallel with development from day one. SOC 2 evidence collection, vendor security questionnaires, and DPIA paperwork take longer than the code does. The teams that ship on time at this tier started the compliance work before the first commit.
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The funding math investors use
Here’s the framing that gets lost in most MVP-cost articles, and it’s the one that matters when you’re standing in front of an investor.
According to Crunchbase, the average North American seed round in 2025 was around $3.6 million. A Tier 3 MVP at €90–€160k represents roughly 3–5% of a typical seed. A Tier 2 MVP at €50k is closer to 1–2%. A Tier 1 build is well under 1%. A Tier 4 build can be 8–12% of a seed, which is why it’s usually paired with a larger raise or with enterprise revenue underwriting it.
Investors don’t think about MVP cost in isolation. They think about what fraction of the round goes to product, what fraction goes to GTM, what fraction goes to runway. A founder asking for $3M to ship a $50k MVP and then spend the rest on growth is a comprehensible bet. A founder asking for $3M and then spending $1.5M on a custom build before launch is not.
This is also why the sequencing matters. Most of our Tier 2 and Tier 3 founders ran a tight Tier 0 or Tier 1 first, used it to validate enough to raise, and then spent the proper money on the proper build. The vibe-coded prototype isn’t a competitor to the agency MVP. It’s the de-risking step that earns you the right to do the agency MVP.
What comes after the MVP
Most MVP-cost articles end at launch. That’s the part founders most need to plan for and almost never see coming.
Hosting, monitoring, and infrastructure. A Tier 1 product runs comfortably on €100–€500/month of cloud and tooling. A Tier 3 product can easily be €2,000–€10,000/month before you have any traction.
Iteration on what users do. The point of an MVP is to learn. Learning means changing things. Most of our clients spend 30–60% of their initial build cost in the first six months post-launch on iteration. If you’ve budgeted only for the build, you’ve under-budgeted.
The team transition. Two-thirds of our clients raise VC funding within twelve to eighteen months of launch, in an ecosystem where roughly 0.05% of startups ever do. Once they raise, most of them eventually internalise their team. That transition has its own cost — handover, documentation, the engineers you hire to take over, sometimes a parallel period where you’re paying both us and them. We help our clients plan for this from the start. Most agencies don’t.
The continued partnership. Some of our clients don’t internalise. They scale with us instead. A successful Tier 3 MVP that finds product-market fit frequently turns into a multi-year, multi-million-euro engagement covering ongoing product development, new modules, scale work, and team augmentation. That trajectory isn’t unusual for us. It’s also worth budgeting against — the question isn’t just “what does the MVP cost,” it’s “what does this product cost over the next three years?”
The rebuild question. If you started on Lovable, Bolt, or Base44 and you’re now serving real users, there’s a moment where the platform becomes the constraint. The rebuild conversation is rarely “throw it all away.” More often it’s “keep the user research and the front-end design language, rebuild the data layer and the auth properly, do it in stages.” That work tends to land in the Tier 2 or Tier 3 range, occasionally Tier 4 if the data sensitivity is real.
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How to figure out which tier fits
Before you talk to any agency or any developer, answer five questions about your project.
One. How sensitive is the data you’ll handle? If users are entrusting you with their money, their medical history, their identity documents, or anything that requires regulatory compliance, you start at Tier 3 minimum. Trying to do that work cheaper is the most expensive mistake in this category.
Two. Is the product’s value in the workflow, or in the architecture? If a user could use a Notion template to do roughly the same thing, you’re probably Tier 1 or Tier 2. If the value lives in real-time processing, complex reasoning, or scale that breaks normal tools, you’re Tier 3 or Tier 4.
Three. How many third-party systems does the product genuinely depend on? Count them. Each one is a meaningful chunk of the budget. Three or more pushes you up a tier.
Four. Who is your first customer? If they’re a consumer, Tier 1 or Tier 2 might be right. If they’re a regulated enterprise, you’re at Tier 3 minimum on day one because of what their procurement team will ask you about.
Five. What does failure cost? If your MVP failing means you learned something valuable and try again, keep it lean. If your MVP failing means a regulator fines you, a hospital sues you, or a bank’s customer data ends up in the wrong place, build it properly the first time.
Where Altar sits on the price spectrum
We sit at the higher end of the price range for what we deliver.
The reasons aren’t a mystery. Our team is fully in-house, fully senior, and based in Portugal — which costs less than San Francisco or London but more than the offshore teams underwriting most of the cheaper “we’ll build your MVP for $15k” propositions you’ll see on Google. Every line of code is written by people we’ve trained and who’ve been with us for years; we don’t subcontract. We don’t put juniors on real client work. Our co-founders are personally involved in every project past a certain complexity threshold.
We also charge for the product reasoning, not just the development. Our 15-day Product Scope phase — €5k for the mini version, €10k for the full version — is a real piece of work, not a sales call. By the end of it, you have user stories, BPMN diagrams, a tech stack rationale, and a precise estimate. Some clients use that document to raise money. Some take it to a different developer to build cheaper. We’re fine with both — the product reasoning is the value, and we’re confident enough in what comes after that we don’t need to lock you in upfront.
Two-thirds of our clients raise VC funding after launching with us, in an ecosystem where roughly 0.05% of startups ever do. Three out of four are still alive after two years. That’s the outcome we’re priced for. If you’re optimising for the lowest possible cash cost on day one, we are not the right partner. If you’re optimising for the probability that your product is alive and growing in twenty-four months, the math looks different.
The cheapest way to find out what tier you’re in
The hardest part of this conversation isn’t the budget. It’s that most founders genuinely don’t know which tier their idea belongs in until they’ve sat down with someone who’s shipped a hundred of them.
Our 15-day Product Scope is built for exactly that conversation. €5,000 for the mini-scope, €10,000 for the full version, three weeks end-to-end. You leave with a clear blueprint, a tech stack, a precise build estimate, and — frequently — a meaningfully smaller scope than the one you walked in with. About 90% of products we ship are leaner than the founder’s initial vision, because we spend the scope phase challenging assumptions rather than rubber-stamping them. That’s where most of the long-term cost is saved.
If you’re at the point where you need to know what your MVP will cost before you can plan the next twelve months, that’s the conversation we have most weeks. Schedule a call — you’ll be talking to product and tech experts, not account managers.
