Pricing guide
MVP budgets: what it costs and what to cut
An MVP budget is not negotiated down — the feature list is cut until it fits.
Numbers first, so we have something to discuss: a web MVP costs an indicative €8,000–30,000 and a mobile one €6,000–18,000 at 2026 Romanian market rates, which makes Romania one of the more affordable places in the EU to test a product idea properly. But stopping at the figures misses the essence: two teams can build the “same” MVP for €12,000 or €45,000, and the difference is not greed — it is the feature list you arrived with. An MVP is the minimum viable product: the smallest version that tests whether anyone pays for your idea. The discipline that gets you to budget has four rules: one problem solved excellently rather than five solved adequately; simple authentication (email plus password or Google login, not an elaborate role system); a minimal, even crude, admin panel — you use it, not your customers; and no native app on day one — a web app runs on any phone and gets built once, not twice for iOS and Android. Every rule you break adds thousands of euros for things your first users never notice. Below, a real cut: from 40 wished-for features down to 12 built.
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Key takeaways
Web MVP: €8,000–30,000
Runs in any browser, phones included. The default choice for validating an idea: one codebase, no App Store approval, changes shipped the same day.
Mobile MVP: €6,000–18,000
Justified only when the idea depends on the phone: push notifications central to the product, camera, GPS, daily use from the pocket. Built cross-platform (Flutter or React Native), otherwise the budget doubles.
What an MVP excludes: 30–50% saved
Complex roles and permissions, analytics dashboards, exhaustive settings, nice-to-have integrations, award-worthy design. All of it can follow validation — and if the product dies, you never paid for it.
A real cut: from 40 features down to 12
Real in structure, anonymised in detail: a founder arrives with the idea of a platform connecting companies to vetted car-repair workshops. His starting list holds 40 features: rich workshop profiles, quote comparison, built-in chat, online payments, photo reviews, push notifications, a loyalty programme, native iOS and Android apps, an analytics panel for the workshops. Estimate on the full list: €70,000+. The filter question applied to every item: “without this, can we still learn whether workshops pay for leads?” Whatever fails the test gets cut.
Twelve features survive: a simple quote-request form, a workshop list with basic profiles, routing each request to matching workshops, replies through the platform, email notification (not push), simple login, a minimal moderation admin — plus measurement of every step in the flow, the one “luxury” kept, because measuring IS the point of an MVP. Cost: €18,000, delivered in 10 weeks as a web application. After validation, the second tranche of money follows a natural order: what paying users request, not what sat on the initial list — and half of the 28 cut features were never requested again. Statistically, that is the fate of starting lists, and the reason cutting is a method, not a compromise.
Frequently asked questions
Do I throw the MVP away after validation and rebuild from scratch?
Rarely: a cleanly built MVP becomes the foundation of the product, extended in tranches with what paying users ask for. Full rewrites happen only when the MVP took deliberate shortcuts (no-code, rapid prototype) or when the product pivots to a different problem — both legitimate scenarios, both to be decided consciously at the start.
Could no-code tools replace paid development for my MVP?
For certain ideas, yes — a simple marketplace or a forms-and-lists service can be validated in Bubble or Softr for €1,000–3,000 and a few weeks. The limits arrive with specific logic, volume and polish; the honest strategy is no-code for the demand test, real development once the first customers pay.
Why do MVP quotes vary so widely for one and the same brief?
Because every vendor interprets how “minimum” the minimum is differently: one prices your list strictly, another adds full administration, extended testing and custom design by default. Compare quotes on content, not totals — and be suspicious of both the one at double the others and the one at half, which usually hides costs discovered later.
How much time and money should I reserve for after the launch?
Plan from the start another 20–30% of the MVP budget for the first 3 months after launch: fixes surfaced by real users, small flow adjustments that unlock conversion, and the monthly infrastructure. An MVP launched without an iteration reserve is an experiment missing its second half — exactly the part where you learn why it did not convert.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247