The True Cost of Building an MVP - Beyond the Development Bill
You have been quoted $30,000 to build your MVP. You set aside $35K to be safe. Then reality hits. Hosting costs $300 per month. A critical bug surfaces the week after launch and takes 40 hours to fix. Users need a feature you did not plan for. Your App Store submission gets rejected twice. Six months later, you have spent $65,000 and you are only now getting to the point where the product is stable enough to grow. This is not a horror story. This is the normal trajectory of an MVP that only budgeted for development.
The development quote - the one you compare between agencies - typically covers 40-60% of what you will actually spend in the first year. The rest goes to costs that are real, predictable, and almost universally underbudgeted. This article lays out every category of cost so you can plan with your eyes open.
The Development Bill - What It Actually Covers
A typical MVP development quote includes design (wireframes and UI), frontend and backend development, basic testing, deployment to a staging environment, and sometimes a production deployment. What it usually does not include: ongoing hosting, SSL certificates, domain configuration, app store submissions, analytics setup, legal compliance (privacy policy, terms of service), email deliverability setup, and post-launch bug fixes beyond a short warranty period.
This is not because agencies are hiding costs. It is because these items vary widely between clients and many of them are ongoing expenses rather than one-time fees. But they are real costs you need to budget for.
Hidden Cost 1 - Infrastructure and Hosting
Hosting costs for an MVP range from $50 per month (a simple web app on a shared platform like Vercel or Railway) to $500-$2,000 per month (a more complex setup with dedicated databases, file storage, CDN, and monitoring). Most MVPs start in the $100-$400 per month range. Over a year, that is $1,200 to $4,800 - not a project killer, but it adds up.
- Cloud hosting (AWS, GCP, or managed platforms) - $100-$500/month
- Database hosting (managed Postgres, MongoDB Atlas) - $25-$200/month
- File storage and CDN (S3 + CloudFront, or similar) - $20-$100/month
- Email service (SendGrid, Postmark) - $20-$80/month
- Monitoring and error tracking (Sentry, Datadog) - $0-$100/month
- Domain and SSL - $15-$50/year
Budget $200-$600 per month for infrastructure during your first year. It will scale with usage, but these are reasonable starting numbers for a product with up to 1,000 active users.
Hidden Cost 2 - Post-Launch Bug Fixes and Patches
No matter how good your development team is, bugs will appear after launch. Real users do things that no test suite anticipates. They use browsers you did not test on. They enter data in formats nobody expected. They find race conditions that only appear under specific timing. Budget 15-20% of your initial development cost for bug fixes in the first 3 months. If your MVP cost $30K to build, set aside $4,500-$6,000 for post-launch fixes.
Hidden Cost 3 - Iteration and Feature Additions
The entire point of an MVP is to learn what users actually need. That learning is worthless if you do not have budget to act on it. Almost every MVP we have launched required significant iteration within 60 days. Not because the initial build was wrong, but because user feedback revealed better approaches that nobody could have predicted without shipping the product.
Common iteration patterns we see: the onboarding flow needs to be simplified (20-40 hours), a reporting feature users assumed existed needs to be built (40-80 hours), the notification system needs more channels or better timing (15-30 hours), and performance optimization is needed because real usage patterns differ from test scenarios (20-60 hours). Budget 30-50% of your initial development cost for iteration in the first 6 months.
Hidden Cost 4 - Marketing and User Acquisition
Building it does not mean they will come. We have seen technically excellent products fail because the founding team spent 100% of their budget on development and had nothing left for marketing. Even if your primary acquisition channel is organic or word-of-mouth, you need budget for a landing page, basic SEO, social media presence, and often a small paid campaign to seed initial users.
Conservative marketing budget for an MVP launch: $2,000-$5,000 for launch preparation (landing page optimization, content, social setup) and $1,000-$3,000 per month for user acquisition (paid ads, content marketing, community engagement). If your total product budget is $50K, at least $8K-$12K should be earmarked for marketing. Without users, the product is just an expensive demo.
Hidden Cost 5 - Maintenance and Security Updates
Software does not sit still. Dependencies get security patches. Cloud providers deprecate APIs. Browsers update and break layouts. Apple and Google change their app store requirements. If you do not maintain your product, it degrades. Within 6-12 months of zero maintenance, you will face security vulnerabilities, broken integrations, and compatibility issues.
Ongoing maintenance costs between $1,000 and $3,000 per month for a typical MVP. That covers dependency updates, security patches, minor bug fixes, and infrastructure monitoring. Some teams handle this with a retainer agreement. Others pay per-incident, which is cheaper on paper but more expensive when something breaks at 2 AM on a Friday.
The Real Budget - A Complete Picture
Let us put real numbers on this. Assume your MVP development quote is $35,000 and you plan to operate for 12 months before your next major funding event or revenue milestone.
- Development (initial build) - $35,000
- Infrastructure (12 months at $300/month average) - $3,600
- Post-launch bug fixes (15% of dev cost) - $5,250
- Iteration and new features (40% of dev cost) - $14,000
- Marketing and user acquisition (launch + 6 months) - $10,000
- Maintenance (9 months at $1,500/month) - $13,500
- Legal and compliance (privacy policy, terms, cookie consent) - $1,500
- Analytics and tooling (Mixpanel, Hotjar, etc.) - $1,200
Total first-year cost: approximately $84,050. That is 2.4 times the original development quote. This is why MVP budgets double - not because of bad planning on the development side, but because the development side is only part of the picture.
What to Cut and What to Keep
If your budget is tight, here is how to prioritize. Never cut security, bug fixes, or infrastructure monitoring. These protect your users and your reputation. Cut cautiously on iteration budget - but do not eliminate it entirely, because an MVP that never improves based on feedback will fail. Cut aggressively on custom design (use a component library), nice-to-have features (launch with fewer, better features), and marketing channels (focus on one channel instead of five).
The minimum realistic budget for a functional MVP that survives its first year is roughly 2x the development quote. If you are quoted $30K and you only have $35K total, you are underfunded. Either raise more, reduce scope to get a $15K development quote, or use a no-code tool to validate the concept before committing to custom development.
Planning Realistically
When you receive a development quote, multiply it by 2-2.5x. That is your real first-year budget. If that number works, move forward with confidence. If it does not, have an honest conversation about what you can cut from the initial scope to bring the development cost down so the total budget stays within reach. The worst outcome is building a product you cannot afford to maintain, iterate on, or market. A smaller product with full lifecycle funding beats a larger product that runs out of money three months after launch.
