"How much does a SaaS MVP cost?"

Google it and you get two answers: $5K on Fiverr or $500K from an enterprise agency. Both are useless.

I've delivered 474+ projects over 20 years, everything from $3K fixed-price builds to platforms handling 50,000+ concurrent users. Here's what neither of those price tags tells you:

The features are the cheap part.

When founders budget an MVP, they price what they can see. The dashboard. The core feature. The landing page. Then the real quote comes in higher and they assume they're being ripped off.

They're not. They just never saw the 30-40% of the work that doesn't look like a feature:

→ Billing logic. The Stripe integration is the easy part. Failed payments, prorations, upgrades mid-cycle, that's where the time goes. → Auth and permissions. Every "simple" app hides edge cases here. → Deployment, monitoring, error handling. Nobody demos this. Everybody needs it. → Testing against real usage, not the happy path.

NextBlock is my favorite example. On paper: a dashboard, an API, Stripe billing. What actually shipped in 28 days: self-serve API key management, usage tracking, billing across 4 tiers, rate limiting enforced per tier at the API layer. Most of that work is invisible in a screenshot. All of it is why the platform processed $250K in its first 60 days with zero major rework, and zero sales calls. The product had to charge strangers money on its own, so everything behind the screenshot had to hold.

That's also why the cheap quote is cheap. It skips the invisible work. You pay for it anyway, just later, as a rewrite, at the worst possible moment.

So before you budget anything, ask one question:

"What has to work when a stranger pays me money without ever talking to me?"

Price THAT. Not the screenshots.

Founders: what's the line item that surprised you most on your first build?