★ Ask Himanshu: how much will this cost?

MVP Cost Estimator

Pick your features, pick who builds it, and get an honest hour-by-hour estimate. Not a "starting at $5k" agency teaser.

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1What are you building on?

Platform

Responsive web app

Design

A polished component library, lightly themed.

2Who builds it?

Team

One person, low overhead, slower calendar time

Blended hourly rate

$/ hour

A starting point. Type the rate from your actual quote.

3Pick the features

Your estimate: $18,700–$39,500.

Want a second opinion? Send it to me and I'll tell you which features I'd cut to ship weeks sooner.

Send me this estimate

How the estimate works

Each feature has a range of hours for a senior engineer building production-quality software. Those hours scale with the number of platforms, then the estimate adds what every real project needs on top of writing features.

build  = setup + design + Σ(feature hours × platform factor)
hours  = (build + 20% QA + PM overhead) × 1.15 contingency
cost   = hours × hourly rate
weeks  = hours ÷ productive hours per week

Ranges, not single numbers, because the honest answer depends on details nobody knows yet: how clean the third-party APIs are, how many design rounds you want, how often scope moves. If someone quotes a single number without asking those questions, the range is hiding in their change requests.

Building for web and mobile is not twice the work with React Native: the backend, business logic and much of the UI code are shared. That is why the platform factor for web plus mobile is about 1.5, not 2.

Worked example

Take a B2B SaaS MVP with 8 features (sign-up & login, profiles & settings, teams, roles & workspaces, payments & subscriptions, admin panel, email & push notifications, dashboards & charts, marketing site), built by a senior freelancer at $60/hour:

Worked example
Line	Hours
Feature build (incl. setup and design)	208–440
QA, project management, contingency	103–218
Total	311–658

That comes to $18,700–$39,500 over roughly 10–22 weeks. Deferring teams, roles & workspaces alone would save about $4,310.

Hours by feature

The ranges the estimator uses, before platform factor and overhead. The features founders most often underestimate are payments, permissions and admin tooling: none of them are visible in a demo, and all of them are needed the week after launch.

Hours by feature
Feature	Covers	Hours
Sign-up & login	Email + Google/GitHub OAuth, password reset, sessions	16–32
2FA / SSO	TOTP or SMS codes, or SAML/OIDC for enterprise customers	16–40
Profiles & settings	Account page, preferences, avatar, delete account	12–24
Teams, roles & workspaces	Invites, permissions, multi-tenant data isolation	32–64
Payments & subscriptions	Stripe/Razorpay checkout, plans, webhooks, invoices	32–64
Marketplace payouts	Split payments, seller onboarding/KYC, escrow, refunds	48–96
Admin panel	Manage users, content and orders without touching the DB	32–64
Email & push notifications	Transactional email, push, in-app, preferences	16–40
Real-time chat	Messaging, presence, unread counts, attachments	40–80
File uploads & media	Direct-to-storage uploads, image resizing, limits	16–32
Search & filters	Full-text search, facets, sorting, pagination	16–40
Maps & location	Geocoding, nearby search, live location	24–48
Booking & scheduling	Availability, time zones, reminders, cancellations	32–72
Dashboards & charts	User-facing analytics, aggregates, exports	24–56
Third-party integrations (×2)	e.g. Slack, Google Calendar, HubSpot, Zapier	24–60
AI feature (LLM)	Chat, summaries or generation with RAG over your data, plus evals	40–100
AI agent with tools	Multi-step agent that takes actions, with guardrails and logging	80–160
Reviews & ratings	Ratings, moderation, aggregate scores	12–24
Marketing site	Landing page, pricing page, SEO basics, blog	12–32
Public API	API keys, rate limits, docs	32–64
Offline mode & sync	Local storage, conflict resolution (mobile)	40–80

Questions founders actually ask

How accurate is this estimate?

For a well-scoped MVP, expect the real number to land inside the range, assuming scope stays put. The bigger risk is scope creep, not the estimate: every feature added mid-build costs more than it would have up front.

Why is this higher than the agency quotes I've seen?

Teaser quotes usually exclude QA, project management, revisions and a buffer for the unknown. This estimator includes all four, so it is closer to what you will actually pay.

Do AI coding tools make an MVP cheaper?

They speed up boilerplate, tests and UI scaffolding. They do not remove product decisions, integrations, edge cases or debugging in production, which is where most of the hours in this breakdown sit.

Should I build web or mobile first?

Web first for most B2B products and anything people use at a desk. Mobile first when the core action happens on the go. React Native lets you cover iOS and Android with one codebase if you need both.

What is the cheapest way to validate before building?

A landing page with a waitlist, then a manual or no-code version of the core workflow for the first users. Build the real product once people are waiting for it.

Estimate by product type

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Fine print

Tools: on the house.
Engineer: by the hour.

Building it isn't free either, but it can be faster than you think. Send me the breakdown and I'll tell you what I'd ship first.

I'm Himanshu, an AI and full-stack engineer. I build MVPs, AI agents and the growth plumbing around them for early-stage startups.

Hire me →My projects