The short answer
Our SaaS MVP tier is a fixed £12,500 (about $15,500): your core workflow built end-to-end, authentication and user management, and production deployment included — delivered in 8–12 weeks. The price is agreed before we start and doesn't move unless the scope does. It's on our pricing page, not hidden behind a sales call.
An MVP — minimum viable product — is the smallest version of your product that real users can pay for. Not a prototype, not a demo: a live product with the one workflow that matters, running in production. Getting that definition right is most of the budget battle, which is where the industry's pricing chaos comes from.
Why every other answer is a range
Published cost guides put SaaS MVP development anywhere from around $10,000 to $150,000 and beyond (see, for instance, SoftTeco's guide among many similar ones), and UK-focused guides commonly land in the £40,000–£80,000 bracket for comparable scope. Three things drive the spread:
- Hourly billing — when revenue scales with hours, there's no incentive to define a small scope. A range keeps options open; a fixed number closes them.
- Undefined "MVP" — one team's MVP is a login page and a form; another's includes multi-tenancy, billing and an admin console. Without a scope, a price is meaningless.
- Team structure — a project manager, a designer, two developers and a QA engineer at day rates costs what you'd expect. A small senior team that has built these systems before doesn't need the overhead.
None of this makes other agencies dishonest. It makes their pricing model incompatible with giving you a straight answer.
What £12,500 buys — exactly
- Your core workflow, end-to-end — the single journey users pay for, from sign-up to the moment of value, built properly.
- Authentication and user management — accounts, sessions, password reset; the table stakes done securely.
- Production deployment included — real infrastructure with backups and monitoring, not a staging link and a handshake.
- 8–12 week delivery — the essential product runs on staging within weeks, then gets hardened for launch.
What it deliberately doesn't include
Honesty about the boundary is what makes the price real. The MVP tier doesn't include multi-tenant architecture, subscription billing, role hierarchies with audit trails, or dashboards and reporting — because most first versions don't need them, and adding them "just in case" is how £12,500 becomes £45,000. When you do need them, that's our Growth tier at a fixed £24,500: the complete platform a business runs on.
Your realistic options, compared
| Route | Typical cost signal | The trade |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | Lowest quotes, widest variance | Can be excellent; you carry the risk of a single person's availability, and "production-ready" varies wildly. |
| Offshore team | Attractive day rates, opaque totals | Rates look low, hours multiply, and communication overhead lands on you as the de-facto project manager. |
| Traditional agency | £40k–£80k+ (UK guides) | Process and polish, paid for hourly — with scope conversations that tend to grow the number, not shrink it. |
| Fixed-price, productized | Published number | The agency carries the estimation risk. The discipline of a fixed scope is a feature: it forces the MVP to stay minimum. |
How to keep an MVP at MVP size
Whoever builds it, the budget is won or lost in scoping:
- One core workflow. If the sentence describing your product contains "and", cut everything after it for version one.
- Buy the boring parts. Payments, email, auth — proven services beat custom builds at this stage.
- A cut list, kept visibly. Every good idea that isn't essential goes on the version-two list, not into the build.
- Production from day one. A demo you have to rebuild for real users isn't a head start — it's a sunk cost.
Questions we hear a lot
How long does a SaaS MVP take to build?
Our MVP tier delivers in 8–12 weeks, with the core product running on staging well before that. Because the scope is fixed, the timeline is too — it's agreed alongside the price before work begins.
What if I want changes mid-build?
Changes happen — real feedback should shape the product. Any change is priced and approved before it's built, so the number never moves without your sign-off. Small adjustments within the agreed scope are just part of the build.
What happens after launch?
The platform is 100% yours — code, infrastructure and IP, with documentation and handover included. If you want us to stay on, Platform Care from £495/mo covers infrastructure, monitoring, backups and monthly development hours. Available, never required.
Is £12,500 really enough to build something real?
For one core workflow done properly, yes — because we've built the underlying systems (auth, deployment, data models) many times before, and because the fixed scope keeps the build honest. What it won't buy is five features at once; that's the point of an MVP.