You have a budget. You need an MVP. And the last thing you want is a developer billing you $150/hour with no end date in sight.
That is the core problem fixed-price MVP development solves. You agree on a scope, you agree on a price, and you know exactly what you are paying before a single line of code gets written.
This post walks through how we do it at Buldtech — the exact engagement model, the pricing, and the guarantees. If you are evaluating whether to work with us, this is the post to read.
Why hourly billing is a trap for founders
Hourly billing creates a misaligned incentive. The longer a project takes, the more the agency earns. The founder absorbs all the risk: scope changes, technical debt, slow communication — it all shows up on the invoice.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A founder comes to us after spending $14,000 over three months with a freelance team billing hourly. They have a half-finished product, no deployment, and a Slack channel full of unanswered questions. The freelancers were not malicious. There was just no structural incentive to ship fast.
Fixed-price flips the risk. We quote a number. If we underestimate the work, that is our problem, not yours. If scope is clear (and we make sure it is), you get your product for the price we agreed on.
The 6-step engagement model
Every Buldtech project follows the same sequence. No exceptions.
Step 1: Discovery call (30 minutes)
You tell us what you are building and why. We ask questions about your users, your market, and what you have tried so far. No pitch deck required. No technical knowledge required.
By the end of this call, we know whether your project is a fit for our process. If it is not, we tell you and suggest alternatives.
Step 2: Written scope document
Within 48 hours of the discovery call, you receive a scope document. This is not a vague proposal. It includes:
- The primary user outcome your MVP delivers
- The exact features included (and a non-goals list of what is excluded)
- Technical architecture decisions (platform, stack, integrations)
- Timeline with milestone dates
You review it, ask questions, request changes. Nothing moves forward until you sign off.
If you want to understand how we think about scoping, read our guide to scoping an MVP. The scope document is where most project failures get prevented.
Step 3: Fixed-price quote
Based on the signed scope document, you get a fixed price. Not an estimate. Not a range. A number.
Our current pricing tiers:
- Starter — $4,000 (2-3 week delivery): Single-workflow MVPs. Think a landing page with waitlist, a booking tool, or a simple internal dashboard.
- Standard — $8,000 (3-4 week delivery): Multi-feature MVPs with authentication, payments, or third-party integrations. This is our most common tier.
- Custom — $12,000+ (scoped individually): Complex products with AI features, marketplace dynamics, or multi-role systems.
You pay 50% upfront and 50% on delivery. If the project requires more than what fits in these tiers, we scope and quote it separately — but you always know the total before we start.
Step 4: Day-10 demo
This is the checkpoint that makes the whole model work.
Ten days into the build, you see a working demo of the core functionality. Not wireframes. Not mockups. A working product you can click through.
This is your opportunity to validate that the product matches your expectations. If something is off, we adjust within the remaining scope. If there is a fundamental misalignment — which is rare when the scope document is solid — we discuss options before burning more time.
The Day-10 demo exists because we have learned that showing progress early prevents the “this is not what I asked for” conversation at the end. For a deeper look at how this fits into the full build timeline, see the 21-day sprint breakdown.
Step 5: Day-21 delivery
You receive:
- Deployed product on your infrastructure (or ours, transferred to you)
- Full source code in a repository you own
- Documentation covering deployment, environment variables, and architecture decisions
- Admin credentials and access to all third-party services
This is not a handoff where you need to hire another developer to figure out what happened. The codebase is clean, documented, and yours.
Step 6: 30-day bug guarantee
For 30 days after delivery, we fix any bugs in the delivered scope at no additional cost. A bug means something that was specified in the scope document but does not work as described.
Feature requests, design changes, and new functionality are not bugs — those go into a v2 conversation. But if the payment flow breaks or a form does not submit correctly, we fix it.
Code ownership: you own everything
This is non-negotiable. Every line of code, every design asset, every database schema — it belongs to you from day one. We do not hold source code hostage. We do not charge licensing fees. You can take the codebase to any other developer after delivery and they can pick up where we left off.
We set up the repository under your GitHub or GitLab account during the first week. You have read access throughout the build. There is no “big reveal” at the end.
What if you don’t like the Day-10 demo?
This is the question founders care about most, so here is the honest answer.
In most cases, the Day-10 demo is close to expectations because the scope document already locked the details. Adjustments at this stage are usually small: “Can we change the order of these steps?” or “Can this button be more prominent?”
If there is a larger misalignment, we diagnose whether it is a scope interpretation issue or a scope gap. Scope interpretation issues get fixed within the existing timeline. Scope gaps — features that were not in the scope document — get logged for v2.
In three years of running this model, we have never had a project where the Day-10 demo was so far off that the engagement failed. The scope document prevents that.
Who this model works for
Fixed-price MVP development works best for founders who:
- Have a clear idea of the problem they are solving (even if the solution is fuzzy)
- Can commit to a 30-minute discovery call and a scope review within the first week
- Want to launch and learn, not build a “complete” product before anyone uses it
- Have a budget between $4,000 and $12,000
It does not work for founders who want to “figure it out as we go” with open-ended timelines. That is a different engagement model, and we are not the right fit for it.
Next step
If you want to explore whether your project fits the fixed-price model, start with our MVP Scope Clarity Checklist. It walks you through the same scoping questions we use in our discovery calls, so you arrive prepared — whether you work with us or someone else.