If you’ve asked for three quotes for your MVP, you probably have three figures that look nothing alike: €5,000, €20,000 and €60,000 for “the same thing”. They’re not all lying. They’re building different things and calling them the same.
Here are the real ranges in play in Spain in 2026, what explains the differences, and — more importantly — how to decide how much you should spend, which isn’t the same as how much you can.
The ranges, no beating around the bush
- No-code / low-code MVP (€0 – €4,000). Tools like Bubble, Webflow or an automation stack. Perfect for validating an idea or getting your first users with barely any code. The limit: when you grow or need something the tool can’t do, you have to rebuild it.
- Light custom MVP (€8,000 – €22,000). Real code, one core feature done well, sensible architecture. What you need if you’re going to show it to investors or to paying users. This is the range most serious MVPs fall into.
- Custom MVP with complexity (€22,000 – €60,000 and up). When there’s AI to integrate or train, several user types, integrations with external systems, regulatory requirements (health, fintech) or a need to scale from day one. Here the “MVP” starts to look like a product.
A 2026 note: with AI-assisted development, these ranges have dropped noticeably compared with a couple of years ago.
The expensive mistake isn’t picking the wrong range. It’s paying for the high range when the low one would have validated the idea just as well — or paying for the low one when your product needed real foundations.
If you want to place your own idea in one of these ranges, our cost estimator gives you a ballpark figure in a couple of minutes.
What blows up the budget
Four factors explain almost the whole difference between quotes:
- How many user types there are. An app with a single user type is one thing. The moment you have “the buyer”, “the seller” and “the admin”, you multiply screens, permissions and tests. Each role is almost a small product.
- How much AI, and what kind. Calling a model’s API is cheap. Training or fine-tuning a model on your data, setting up RAG over your documents or guaranteeing reliable results in a sensitive domain is another league — and another price.
- The integrations. Connecting to payment gateways, an ERP, a CRM or third-party APIs is where the time nobody budgets well goes. Each integration brings its own edge cases.
- The quality bar you genuinely need. An MVP for an investor demo doesn’t need the same as one that’ll process real payments on Monday. Paying for production quality for a demo is throwing money away; paying for demo quality for something in production is worse.
The right question isn’t the price
Before comparing quotes, answer this one: what does this MVP have to prove, and to whom?
- If it has to prove to investors that there’s traction → spend on what generates that traction (the flow that makes them fall in love), not on a pretty admin panel they’ll never see.
- If it has to prove to you that the idea works → no-code or a very light custom build usually does. You don’t know enough yet to justify more.
- If it has to hold up real paying users from the start → that’s where you do need foundations: auth, payments, background jobs and observability. Skipping them is the debt that costs you a quarter after product-market fit.
This is exactly what we cover in how we build an MVP in 12 weeks: the difference between one that survives the seed round and one that sinks with the first 1,000 users is almost never the framework. It’s the decisions in week one.
How to spend less without regretting it
- Cut scope, not quality. Better to do one thing well than five halfway. Every feature you park is money you don’t spend and maintenance you don’t inherit.
- Don’t rebuild what’s solved. Auth, payments, infra: building your logic on proven foundations lowers the cost without lowering the solidity. Reinventing authentication is never where your value is.
- Boring architecture at the base, exciting in the product. Boring decisions in the database save you the expensive rewrites. Save the risky stuff for what the user sees.
- Measure to decide the next step. An instrumented MVP tells you what to build next with data, not with opinions. That information is worth more than the feature you saved.
In short
“How much does an MVP cost?” depends on what it has to prove and to whom. The realistic range for a serious custom MVP in Spain is between €8,000 and €22,000, and it climbs from there with AI, roles and integrations. But the figure that matters isn’t the one on the quote: it’s how much closer it gets you to the next decision — the round, the first paying customer, or the certainty that the idea wasn’t working.
If you’ve got 12 weeks ahead of you and want a second pair of eyes on the plan before spending a euro, let’s talk. One hour of discovery can save you a semester.