What will my MVP cost? The calculator with real fixed prices

Depending on scope, in 2026 an MVP costs from around €8,000 (lean validation MVP) to €70,000 and more (marketplace, median) at traditional agencies, billed hourly (€95–150/h, median €120/h). A typical web-app MVP costs €15,000 to €40,000 on the market (median €27,500). AI-native studios offer the code path as a fixed price from €12,500, each further prototype loop costs €4,500. The calculator shows both paths plus the DIY route for every configuration.

Because AI accelerates implementation, not responsibility. With parallel coding agents, standardisable work (UI, CRUD, scaffolding) drops to 25% to 30% of the classic effort, while security- and compliance-critical work only drops to 82%, because human review dominates there. A typical web-app MVP thus lands at the fixed-price floor of €12,500, which is 45% of the agency median (€27,500), with full code ownership.

The decivo MVP cost index triangulates published market ranges from German development agencies (p25/median/p75 per project type, sources linked) with first-party fixed-price data from real projects. Instead of guessing prices, it estimates complexity in complexity points (1 CP = 4 productive developer hours) and converts it transparently into three procurement paths. Methodology and dataset are openly licensed under CC BY 4.0.

A working Lovable/Claude-Code prototype lowers the cost to the production version because it serves as a living specification and shortens discovery. The calculator models this in the DIY path: tool costs of about €132.50/month plus a statistical rework risk (band S 20%, M 50%, L 75% with basic technical knowledge; higher without coding experience, lower for developers), since AI-generated code often needs rework before launch.

For an MVP with a clearly bounded scope a fixed price is usually the safer choice: the risk of overruns sits with the provider, not you. Hourly rates fit when scope is deliberately open or you're integrating a legacy system with unknown pitfalls. The calculator's quote check places an hourly quote statistically within the market distribution.

Direct tool costs are about €132.50/month (Lovable, Claude, Supabase, hosting). The decisive factor is the time investment: a 52-CP MVP equals 208–520 founder hours depending on your tech level, plus a statistical rework risk that rises steeply with complexity. In regulated environments (health, fintech) the calculator explicitly advises against DIY.

Marketplaces are structurally the most expensive MVP class: supply, demand and transaction must all come together. The classic median is around €70,000 (p25 €45,000, p75 €120,000). But the calculator warns of the scope trap: successful marketplaces like Airbnb launched without integrated payments — the transaction can be handled manually (concierge) at first, saving five figures.

Depending on your state and profile, programmes such as the EXIST founder grant, Digitalbonus Bayern, Pro FIT Berlin, Mittelstand Innovativ & Digital NRW or the Baden-Württemberg innovation vouchers may apply. Important: with almost all programmes the application must be filed BEFORE the project starts. Only the respective funding body gives binding information.

The calculator gives a well-founded budget estimate, not a binding quote. The complexity model is externally validated against three independent market sources and internally calibrated against real fixed-price projects. It is deliberately transparent: methodology, formulas and dataset are public, and it doesn't win every configuration — for small, unvalidated ideas it recommends the cheaper validation sprint or DIY.

A complexity point equals 4.0 productive developer hours (implementation plus test, excluding overhead). This separation decouples the model from hourly rates: market prices change, the feature catalogue stays stable. A lean validation MVP is ≤ 30 CP, a full web-app MVP is 31–65 CP, and a complex product MVP is 66–110 CP. It is the source quantity from which all three cost paths are derived.