Fixed prices scare developers because scope creeps. Two equal lists and a weekly demo have kept my last nine MVPs on budget.
Most founders I work with are paying from a seed round or their own savings. They want a number, not an hourly estimate that grows every month. I have quoted fixed prices for nine MVPs since 2021, and the method matters more than the estimate.
Two lists of equal length
Every proposal has a list of what is included and a list of what is not, and I make them roughly the same length. Admin analytics, CSV import, a second payment provider, a mobile app and multi-language support almost always go on the second list. Writing them down early is what lets the client say yes to the first list.
The excluded list is not a rejection. Each item has a rough price beside it, so the founder can see that CSV import is $900 and decide whether it belongs in version one. About a third of them do get added, at a price agreed before I write a line.
Weekly demos and a staging site from week two
Every Thursday I record a ten-minute walkthrough of what was built and send it with a link to staging. The founder clicks through it on their own time, in their own timezone, and replies with notes. New requests go into a shared change log with a price or a "free, small" tag.
Clients rarely argue with a document they signed and a change log they have been reading every week. The two projects where I lost money were both before I started doing this, when I kept the proposal short to look easy to work with.
Price the risk, not the hours
I estimate in days, multiply by my day rate, then add 20 percent for anything I have not built before: a new payment provider, a third-party API with poor documentation, a real-time feature. My recent MVPs have landed between $12,000 and $22,000 for 8 to 12 weeks of work.
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