How to vet MVP development companies without getting burned: 12 questions
Twelve questions I use to separate real MVP development companies from agencies that will burn six months of runway and ship a demo. Here's what to ask.
- ↳Ask for the GitHub repo of a shipped client MVP, not a case study PDF. Most agencies cannot produce one.
- ↳If they cannot tell you who is writing the code on day one by name, you are talking to a sales layer over offshore subcontractors.
- ↳A real MVP shop has an opinion about scope cuts. If everything you ask for is 'yes, we can do that', run.
- ↳Fixed-bid contracts on MVPs almost always end in a lawyer or a half-built product. Time and materials with a hard cap is the only structure that survives reality.
I have watched four founders in the last year hand $60k to $180k to an MVP development agency and get back something they could not ship. One got a Figma file and a half-wired Next.js repo with no auth. One got a working app that cost $4,200/month to run because someone wired every page to a fresh OpenAI call with no caching. One got ghosted at week 11 of a 12-week engagement.
The agencies were not scams. They had real websites, real LinkedIn profiles, real case studies. They just were not the right shop for the job, and the founders did not know what to ask.
So here are the twelve questions I would ask before signing anything. I have been on both sides of this. We run EdsDev and we get hired to finish what other shops started, so I see the wreckage up close.
The first five questions are about who actually writes the code
Most of the pain comes from a mismatch between who sold you the project and who builds it. The fix is to ask, directly and in writing.
1. Who, by name, is writing the code on day one? Not the team lead, not the PM. The person whose hands are on the keyboard. If the answer is “we will assign someone from our pool”, you are buying a staffing agency, not a product team.
2. Can I talk to them for 20 minutes before signing? A confident shop will say yes. A shop that subcontracts to a body shop in another timezone will find a reason to say no.
3. What is the seniority of that person in years, and what have they personally shipped to production? Junior devs can build great MVPs with the right supervision. They cannot build great MVPs alone. If your lead has three years of experience and no prior shipped product, you are paying to train them.
4. Is any of this work subcontracted, and to where? This is not a gotcha. Plenty of good shops use trusted contractors. But you deserve to know if your $150/hr rate is being passed through to a $25/hr developer in another country, because that markup is buying you something (account management, QA, accountability) and you should know what.
5. What is your team’s turnover rate? Ask it plainly. If three of the five people on your project leave during the engagement, you are starting over.
Questions six through eight are about taste and opinions
A bespoke MVP development company should have opinions. Strong ones. If everything you propose gets a polite “yes, we can build that”, you are not hiring builders, you are hiring a feature factory.
6. Looking at my spec, what would you cut? This is the single most useful question on this list. A real MVP shop will, within ten minutes, tell you which two features are going to eat half the budget and add nothing to the validation goal. If they cannot do that, they are not thinking about your MVP, they are thinking about their invoice.
7. What stack would you pick for this, and why not the alternatives? You are not testing whether they pick your favorite framework. You are testing whether they can defend a choice. “We would use Next.js with Supabase because you need auth and a Postgres on day one, and Firebase locks you into a query model you will outgrow by month three” is a real answer. “We use whatever you prefer” is not.
8. Show me a repo, not a case study. This is the question almost nobody asks and almost no agency is prepared for. You want to see actual code from a shipped client MVP, with the client’s permission, even if it is a sanitized snapshot. Look at the commit history. Look at whether there are tests. Look at whether the README explains how to run it. A startup MVP development company that has shipped real products can produce this within a day. One that cannot is selling you something else.
Questions nine and ten are about money and time
9. Fixed bid or time and materials, and why? I have strong feelings here. Fixed-bid MVP contracts incentivize the shop to ship the minimum interpretation of your spec and fight every change request. Pure T&M incentivizes them to take forever. The structure that actually works is T&M with a not-to-exceed cap and a weekly burn report. If a shop refuses to do this, ask why.
10. What does the handoff look like on the last day? You should be getting: the GitHub org transferred to you, all third-party accounts (Stripe, Resend, Cloudflare, Vercel, whatever) in your name with your billing, a runbook, and at least two hours of recorded walkthrough. If the shop holds the keys to your infrastructure after you stop paying them, you do not own your product.
The last two are the ones that surface the real problems
11. Tell me about a project that went badly. What did you do? Every shop that has shipped more than five projects has at least one that went sideways. If they cannot name one, they are either lying or they have not shipped enough. The answer you want is specific: what broke, what they did about it, what they refunded or extended for free, what they changed in their process. “We had a client where we underestimated the Stripe Connect onboarding by three weeks, we ate the cost, and now we always scope payments separately” is the kind of answer that tells you they are operating in reality.
12. What happens after launch? Your MVP will have bugs on day one. It will need changes in week two. Does the shop offer a maintenance retainer? Are they willing to do an hourly arrangement? Will they help you hire your first internal engineer and hand off cleanly? If their answer is “we move on to the next client”, you are buying a one-night stand at wedding prices.
A note on geography
Founders ask me whether they should hire MVP development companies in the USA, the UK, India, or wherever. The honest answer is that geography matters less than the answers to the twelve questions above. I have seen $200/hr shops in San Francisco ship garbage. I have seen $40/hr teams in Bangalore ship products that are still running profitably four years later. What matters is whether the person writing your code has shipped before, has opinions, and is reachable when something breaks at 2am your time.
The one place geography matters is timezone overlap. If you need to iterate fast in the first six weeks, a 12-hour offset will kill you regardless of how good the team is. Either accept the async constraint and plan around it, or pay for overlap.
What to do with the answers
Send these twelve questions, in writing, to every shop on your shortlist before any sales call. The ones that respond with thoughtful written answers within a week are the ones worth talking to. The ones that try to skip the questions and book a call are the ones selling vibes.
If you want a second set of eyes on a proposal you have already received, send it over. I will tell you what I would ask.
Common questions
▸How much should an MVP actually cost in 2025?
For a real, shippable MVP with auth, a database, payments, and one or two core flows, expect $25k to $80k from a competent small shop, and $80k to $250k from a mid-sized agency. Anything under $15k is either a no-code prototype or a team that is going to disappear halfway through. Anything over $300k for an MVP is usually scope creep dressed up as a quote. The variance is mostly about how much product thinking you need them to do versus how much you bring yourself.
▸How long should an MVP take to build?
Six to twelve weeks of actual build time is the realistic range for most MVPs. Less than six and you are shipping a prototype, not a product. More than twelve and the scope is too big for an MVP, full stop. If a shop quotes you four months, the right move is usually to cut features until it fits in ten weeks, not to extend the timeline.
▸Should I hire a freelancer or an MVP development agency?
A senior freelancer who has shipped products end-to-end is often the best value for a small MVP, if you can find one and if you have the bandwidth to project-manage. An agency is worth the markup when you need design, frontend, backend, and DevOps coordinated under one roof, or when you need the work to continue even if one person gets sick. Avoid the middle ground of cheap agencies that are really just freelancers with a logo.
▸Is it worth hiring an MVP development company overseas to save money?
It can work, and I have seen it work well, but the cost savings are usually 30 to 50 percent, not 80 percent. The teams charging $15/hr are almost never the ones shipping production-quality code. Look for shops in India, Eastern Europe, or Latin America in the $50 to $90/hr range with named senior engineers, async communication built into their process, and at least four hours of timezone overlap with you.
▸What is the single biggest red flag when evaluating MVP shops?
They cannot or will not show you code from a previous client project. Case studies and screenshots are easy to fabricate or embellish. A shop that has actually shipped will have GitHub repos they can walk you through, with real commit history, real PR reviews, and real bug fixes. If every conversation stays at the level of marketing site testimonials, you have no evidence they can build.
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