How much an MVP costs in the UK: the price bands, what drives them, and what quotes leave out.

There is no single UK price for an MVP, because the word covers everything from a clickable prototype to a product that takes payments from real customers. The useful comparison is by route: build it yourself in a tool, hire a freelancer by the day, or buy a fixed or published price from an agency or studio. Each route moves a different risk onto you, so the cheapest headline is not always the cheapest outcome.

A freelancer’s total is the day rate multiplied by the days. At the measured UK median of £525 a day, thirty working days is £15,750 before design, testing and project management, which you then do yourself. Studio prices bundle those roles into one number, which is why the published figures cluster between £10,000 and £25,000 for a first release.

Tool and studio prices from each firm’s own pages, read October 2026, excluding VAT. Day rates from ITJobsWatch, six months to 14 September 2026. The thirty-day figure is simple arithmetic, not a quote.

Almost every MVP quote is driven by the same handful of decisions. The number of user types matters most: a product with one kind of user is one product, while a marketplace with buyers, sellers and an admin is three. After that come the number of workflows, how money is taken, and how many other systems the product has to talk to. Each of these is a scoping decision before it is an engineering one, which is why a tight written scope is the cheapest thing you can bring to a quote.

Time and materials bills for the hours spent, so the estimating risk sits with you: if the build takes twice as long, you pay twice as much. A fixed price agrees the scope and the number in writing before work starts, with a list of what is not included, so the estimating risk sits with the supplier. Neither is dishonest. Time and materials suits work that genuinely cannot be scoped yet; a fixed price suits a first product where the founder needs to know the number to raise or spend against it.

Two quotes for the same idea can differ by thousands of pounds simply because one includes things the other leaves for later. Before comparing numbers, check each quote against this list and ask the supplier to say in writing which items are in and which are out.

An MVP starts costing money the day it goes live, and the bill grows with users rather than with time. The fixed part is hosting, the database, email sending, monitoring and any store memberships. The variable part is payment fees on every transaction and, if the product uses AI, the model cost of every request. That second number is the one founders most often miss, because an AI feature can cost more for a heavy user than that user pays.

The useful measure is cost per active user per month, set against what each user pays. Ask your supplier to show it before launch, with the AI spend attributed to each customer and feature and a spending ceiling that has been tested, so the first growth spurt does not arrive as a surprise invoice.

We build a startup MVP for £10,000 to £20,000, fixed against a written scope, and launch it in four to six weeks. That covers one core workflow end to end, sign-up and accounts for one user type, payments through Stripe with usage metering, an admin view for the founder, analytics and error tracking, and a documented codebase in your repository. The code, the hosting and the provider accounts are in your name from day one, not on final payment.

Native mobile apps, a second user type and marketplace mechanics are quoted as later phases, within our app development range of £8,000 to £30,000 fixed per phase. It is the same stack we run our own products on: Onrolo, an applicant tracking system for UK recruitment agencies, and GoRizzume, a careers platform for UK students and graduates on web and mobile.

Send every supplier the same one-page brief, and ask the same questions of every reply. The brief does more to bring the price down than any negotiation, because most of the spread in MVP quotes is suppliers guessing at scope differently.