Why an MVP no longer has to cost €50,000

TL;DR

• Classic MVP quotes sit at €20,000–€180,000, that’s not a made-up number, it reflects real team costs over several months.
• At TAISC we often price well below that, because a generalist working with AI agents covers tasks that used to need four roles.
• This isn’t a trick or a hidden quality cut. It’s a different cost structure that works for focused MVPs and doesn’t for huge enterprise systems.

The moment that made me pause

A few months ago I sat in a call with a founder who showed me his latest MVP quote: €78,000, six months, a four-person team. He didn’t go ahead with it, the budget simply wasn’t there. He’s not the only one. I hear that number constantly, from founders, from innovation leads at mid-sized companies who got a quote a year or two ago and have carried that order of magnitude in their head ever since.

The problem: at the time, that number was probably even fairly calculated. UX design, frontend, backend, project management, four roles, four day rates, several months. That adds up to six figures fast. What’s changed since then isn’t that software development got cheaper. It’s that one person with the right tools can now deliver what used to take four roles.

Why I don’t just claim this, I show the math

I now price MVPs at TAISC for a fraction of what classic quotes charge, for comparable scope. That’s not a marketing number, I worked through the actual ranges with market data and real projects, including an interactive calculator, in the post on theaisoftwarecompany.com. If you want the numbers in detail, they’re there.

What I want to address here instead is the question that’s actually occupied me personally: is this sustainable, or am I building a business model that collapses on bigger projects?

The honest answer: it works excellently for focused MVPs, one core process, one user role, a manageable data model. Exactly the model I described in the post on Forward Deployed Engineering: an experienced engineer who writes code in your codebase instead of delivering slides, supported by agents that handle the grunt work. For a project with five teams, years of legacy integration, and strict compliance requirements, this doesn’t replace a 20-person team. I wouldn’t sell that to anyone who actually needs one.

What I’d be skeptical of in someone else’s proposal

Since I’m on the vendor side myself, I want to be open about where I’d be skeptical of other people’s proposals, completely independent of whether you end up working with us or not:

1. A fixed price without a discovery call. If someone gives you an exact fixed price after 30 minutes, without understanding your data model, integrations, and user roles, that’s either a very rough guess or deliberately lowballed to catch up on change requests later.
2. No budget for post-launch adjustments. Realistically plan for 20–40% of the original budget for adjustments once you have real user data. An MVP is the beginning, not the end.
3. “AI just makes it cheaper” without proof. That’s exactly the claim I’m making in this post, and exactly why it needs to be backed up, not just asserted. Ask for concrete reference projects, not buzzwords.

State funding as an extra lever, not a baseline plan

For companies in Baden-Württemberg, there’s often one more piece: the Innovationsgutschein BW, a 50% funding rate up to €7,500, or for more demanding projects the Hightech variant up to €20,000. The constraint I keep running into on real client projects: the voucher is tied to genuine technical novelty, not the plain implementation of standard functionality. A detailed, current overview of the programs (including the Digitalisierungsprämie Plus grant variant that was discontinued in 2025 and still haunts a lot of outdated articles) is in the TAISC post.

I treat funding as a bonus on every project, never as the basis of the calculation. If you need to launch in four weeks, you can’t wait on a funding decision that takes weeks.

What I’ve learned from this

The most important shift in perspective for me: the price of an MVP was never the product itself, it was always a function of the team structure you had to build to make it. When the team structure changes, because one person with the right tools can deliver what used to need four roles, the price inevitably changes too, without quality having to suffer.

That’s not a reason for overconfidence. It’s a reason to honestly question existing price assumptions, ours included, just as much as any other vendor you’re currently evaluating.

If you’re wondering right now whether your MVP really has to cost six figures: let’s talk for 30 minutes, no strings attached.