You have an idea — but you're not ready to bet €80k on it yet.

You have an idea you believe in. You also have a healthy fear of being wrong about it. Agencies quote €80–120k and 6–9 months for a v1; freelancers quote less but disappear halfway; AI builders deliver something that demos well but breaks the moment a real user touches it. None of that lets you do the one thing you actually need: see whether the idea survives contact with real people. So the idea sits. You don't want to commit serious money to something that might not land, and you don't want to commit zero money and end up with nothing testable. There's no middle path — until there is one. The middle path is a small, real, live version: enough to put in front of users, enough to prove or disprove the core bet, with no expectation that it's the final product.

An MVP done right has a precise definition: the smallest live thing that lets you test your core assumption with real users. Live means deployed on a real domain, real database, real auth, real payments if money has to move. Not a Figma click-through. Not a slide deck with 'login' buttons that go nowhere. It also means: smallest. Not 'small with a few extras.' Not 'small but with a dashboard for admins because that'd be nice.' Smallest that still tests the bet. Every feature that doesn't directly serve the validation gets pushed to v1 — not because those features are bad, but because adding them now turns a 6-week MVP into a 6-month build, and you're back to the original problem.

MVPs are quoted as a fixed price for a fixed scope inside a fixed timeline. The number is on paper before kickoff, the scope is on paper before kickoff, the deadline is on paper before kickoff. No mid-project surprises, no "and one more thing" invoices, no scope creep dressed up as feedback. The discipline is the point. Fixed price only works if scope stays scoped, and scope only stays scoped if I push back on additions during the build. That pushback isn't me being difficult — it's me protecting the deadline you're paying for. Anything that genuinely has to go in gets explicitly traded against something that comes out, in writing, before it gets added. After the MVP launches and you've seen real signal, those parked ideas come back as v1 — properly scoped, properly priced, properly planned.

An MVP you can put in front of users has to survive the first 100 of them, not just one tester on your laptop. So under the small surface lives the full grown-up plumbing: Laravel + Filament backend, Next.js or Vue front, real database, hardened server with SSL and backups, monitoring, transactional email that actually arrives, auth that doesn't leak. The codebase is yours from day one, on your GitHub, with documentation a future engineer can read. What you don't get is over-engineering. No 'enterprise architecture' you'll never use. No 5 micro-services because that's the trend. The stack is chosen so that if the MVP works, v1 builds on the same code rather than starting from scratch — and so that if the MVP doesn't work, you haven't paid for a foundation you didn't need.

After 4–8 weeks the MVP is live and real users start touching it. What happens next depends on what they show you. Sometimes the bet is right and you want to invest in v1 — at that point we already have working code, real user data, and a parked feature list that's grown sharper because the live product taught us what actually matters. v1 gets quoted properly, with priorities driven by signal instead of guesswork. Sometimes the bet doesn't land the way you hoped — and that's also a real outcome. You've spent a fraction of a v1 budget to learn something true about the market, you have working software you can pivot from, and you've avoided the much larger mistake of committing 6 months and €80k to an idea before testing it. Either way the MVP did its job: it converted an expensive guess into a cheap fact.

Fixed price by quote, depending on what 'smallest live testable version' looks like for your specific idea. A focused B2B form-and-dashboard MVP lands in a different bracket than a marketplace with two-sided users and payment flows. Once we've defined the scope on the strategy call, you get a fixed-price quote tied to a fixed delivery date. The quote includes everything needed to put real users in front of the product: build, design, server, deployment, basic monitoring and the handover. It does not include marketing, paid traffic, support staff or growth — those are separate work, and worth having an honest conversation about only after the MVP shows whether it's worth growing in the first place.