A founder told me last month that another studio had quoted £25,000 for her MVP, and ours looked expensive sitting next to it. I did not argue the price. I asked what the £25k actually included. Once we unpicked it, the answer was a login screen, three core screens, and a promise to figure out the rest later. That is the £25k MVP myth in one sentence: a number that sounds achievable because it quietly leaves out most of the work. I want to explain where the figure comes from, what it really buys, and what an honest budget looks like, because believing the myth is one of the most expensive mistakes a first-time founder can make.
Where the £25k MVP myth comes from
The number is not invented. It is real, it just describes a fraction of a build rather than a finished product. £25k is roughly what a couple of developers cost for a few weeks, which is enough to produce something that demos beautifully and then falls over the first time real users touch it.
The myth survives for two reasons. The first is marketing. Agency landing pages and “how much does an app cost” articles anchor on the lowest plausible figure because a low number wins the click. The second is the rise of no-code tools, which genuinely can put a basic app together cheaply, as long as you never need it to do anything a template did not anticipate. Put those together and £25k becomes the headline price for a category of work that almost nobody actually wants to ship.
What £25k actually buys
To be clear, £25k is real money and it buys real things. It just does not buy a product you can confidently put in front of paying customers.
In our experience that budget covers a tightly scoped single-platform build: one or two core flows, a simple backend, light design, and almost no time for the unglamorous work that decides whether an app survives. No payments to speak of, no admin tooling, minimal testing, and very little room to fix what real users break. A developer day in the UK in 2026 runs roughly £400 to £900 depending on seniority and whether you hire a studio, a freelancer, or an offshore team. So £25k is somewhere between 30 and 50 working days in total. Spread that across design, build, testing, and project management and you can see why the scope has to be brutal. Something has to give, and what usually gives is everything that makes the app feel finished.
This is the same gap I see when a founder compares a product studio quote with a freelancer one and assumes they are pricing the same thing. They almost never are. One number includes the parts that make a product trustworthy, and the other treats them as someone else’s problem for later.
The £150k truth, and why quotes vary so much
The honest range for a production-ready MVP, one that can take payments, handle real users, and not embarrass you, is wider than any single headline number. We tell founders to plan for somewhere between £40k and £150k, and the spread is not agencies being greedy. It is the feature list doing the talking.
A few decisions move the budget far more than the day rate ever will:
| What you add | Rough effect on the budget |
|---|---|
| Payments and subscriptions (through a provider like Stripe) | Adds meaningful build and testing time, plus ongoing fees |
| An admin dashboard to run the thing | A second product hiding behind the first |
| Two platforms instead of one | Close to double the front-end work |
| Real-time, AI, or other genuinely hard features | The single biggest swing in either direction |
The reason two studios can quote £40k and £140k for “the same app” is that they are not scoping the same app. One is pricing the demo, the other is pricing the thing you can actually run a business on. Until you compare what is inside each number, the cheaper quote always wins, and it wins by hiding the work you will have to pay for anyway, usually later and in a panic. If you want a sense of where the money goes before you even commission a build, the day rates a senior technical lead charges are a useful reference point.
What to do instead of chasing the cheapest number
The fix is not to spend more. It is to stop shopping for a price and start shopping for a scope.
Write down the single problem your app solves and the one flow that proves it. That is your real MVP, and it is almost always smaller than the forty-screen version in your head. Then turn that into a brief that names the problem rather than a wish list of features, and ask every studio to quote against the same scope. The moment two quotes describe the same work, the prices stop looking mysterious and start looking comparable.
When you read a quote, look for what is itemised, not just the total at the bottom. A number you can break apart is one you can trust. A single round figure with no breakdown is the £25k MVP myth wearing a nicer font. Learning to scope an app project properly is worth more than any amount of haggling, because it changes what you are buying rather than just what you pay.
And be honest with yourself about the truth underneath the myth. A real MVP that real people will use and pay for is a serious piece of work, and serious work costs serious money. The founders who do well are not the ones who found the cheapest number. They are the ones who understood what the number had to cover before they signed.
If you are staring at two wildly different quotes and cannot tell which one is lying to you, that is exactly the conversation worth having before you commit. Tell us what you are trying to build and we will tell you, honestly, what it should actually cost.
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