I get this question constantly, usually from founders who have already received one quote and are trying to figure out if they are being taken for a ride.

The short answer is: probably not, but the quote you received was built for a different market than yours.

Here is how I actually think about MVP costs, based on running this calculation with dozens of clients over the past few years.

First — what I mean by “MVP”

I am not talking about a prototype or a mockup. I mean a working product that a real user can log into, use to accomplish the core thing your product does, and that you could plausibly charge for. Auth system, a core feature module, basic admin, one or two integrations, deployed to something better than localhost. That is the scope.

A landing page is not an MVP. A Figma file is not an MVP. I am talking about the thing where real code exists and real users can do real things with it.

US agencies and freelancers

The range I see consistently is $35,000–$80,000 for a mid-tier US agency, and $20,000–$50,000 for a strong US freelancer. Timeline is 3–5 months. The quality ceiling is genuinely high. The process is usually solid. The budget eliminates most early-stage founders before the conversation even starts.

I am not knocking this model. For a founder who raised $2M and needs a CTO-quality technical partner, a US agency makes sense. The math does not work for most people reading this, though.

Traditional offshore

The quote range is $12,000–$30,000. Timeline is 2–4 months. The quality variance is enormous — probably the widest variance of any model. I have seen brilliant work come out of offshore teams and I have seen disasters. The difference is almost always in the process, not the technical ability of the individual engineers.

The most common failure mode is communication breakdown compounded by a lack of visibility. You do not see what is being built until it is done, and by then changing direction is expensive.

AI-native delivery

This is what we do at WizQuest, so I will be transparent about where I might have blind spots here.

For the same MVP scope: $5,000–$10,000, 4–6 weeks. The hourly rate is $15/hr all-in — AI and token costs absorbed, security scans included, sprint ceremonies included.

The reason the economics work is that AI agents handle the repetitive parts of software development — the boilerplate generation, the unit test writing, the documentation, the code review preparation — in a fraction of the time a developer would. Senior engineers supervise and own the output. The quality bar does not drop. The hours required do.

I want to be honest about a limitation here: this model works extremely well for the categories of work AI handles reliably, and less well for genuinely novel problems or highly security-sensitive systems. If your MVP is solving a complex financial algorithm problem, the AI advantage shrinks. If it is a well-defined SaaS product, it is significant.

The question that actually matters

It is not “which model is cheapest?” The question is: how many iterations can you afford before you find product-market fit?

At $60,000 you probably get one swing. At $8,000 you get seven. Early-stage software is mostly about finding the right thing to build, not building the right thing perfectly. More iterations per dollar of runway is almost always the right call.

That said — and I mean this — do not optimise so hard on cost that you pick an agency without a real process. The cheapest option that produces six months of unusable code is more expensive than the mid-range option that ships in six weeks. Price and value are not the same thing, in either direction.