SaaS MVP. Eight weeks to first paying customer.

An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) delivers the smallest slice of functionality that a real customer will pay for. Three to five primary workflows, a working auth and billing layer, basic onboarding, a deploy pipeline, and enough observability to catch real incidents. An MVP does not include: admin tooling beyond what the founder needs to operate, internationalization, advanced analytics, enterprise SSO, role-based access for teams, or design polish beyond functional. Those ship in the 6 to 18 months after the first paying customer, funded by revenue.

A lean MVP runs 8 weeks. A standard MVP with onboarding, analytics dashboard, and richer primary workflows runs 10 to 12 weeks. Faster than 8 weeks is possible only when the problem is already deeply understood and the scope is brutally narrow. Slower than 14 weeks means scope crept past the MVP definition and you are building a v1 product, not an MVP. We push back hard when scope tries to stretch past 12 weeks; the alternative is missing the market window.

Next.js 15 on the App Router for the front end, TypeScript throughout, Postgres via Supabase or Neon for state, Clerk or Supabase Auth for authentication, Stripe for billing including subscriptions and usage-based metering, Resend for transactional email, and Vercel or Railway for deploy. Sentry for errors, Axiom or Logtail for logs. This stack reaches first customer in 8 weeks consistently; we deviate only when the product has a specific requirement this stack cannot meet.

Yes, and this is where MVPs frequently underestimate effort. Stripe handles the core payments and subscription lifecycle, but checkout flow, plan switching, dunning (failed payment recovery), proration, trial expiration, invoicing, and tax compliance (Stripe Tax for US sales tax and EU VAT in most cases) each need attention. We budget one full week of the 8-to-12 for billing and tax alone. Cutting this short is the single most common cause of MVP revenue leakage.

Two paths. Path one: monthly retainer with us while you hire your first full-time engineer, typically 3 to 6 months. Path two: full handover to an in-house engineer with documentation, a runbook, and two weeks of paired onboarding included. Your code is yours, your infrastructure is yours, and our contract has a written exit clause. Roughly 40 percent of clients take the retainer path; the rest handover within the first quarter after launch.

Four engagement shapes. A 2-week discovery sprint produces requirements, wireframes, and architecture decision records. A lean MVP (8 weeks, auth + billing + 3 workflows + deploy) is the most common; a standard MVP (12 weeks, lean MVP + onboarding + analytics dashboard + richer workflows) is the right call when the product needs more than three workflows on day one. A post-launch retainer covers the first 3 to 6 months. We do not publish dollar figures because scope drives price; written scope and fixed-price quote arrive within 48 hours of the scoping call.