What ₹20,000 buys you — and what it doesn't

MVPs here start at ₹20,000. Starting prices are close to meaningless unless someone tells you what changes them, so this is that explanation.

What that number is

It is the floor for a genuinely small, genuinely useful first version: one clear job, a handful of screens, a database, a deployment, and a person who read every line before it went live. The booking MVP is the honest shape of it.

What pushes it up

• Payments. Money means reconciliation, refunds, failed-payment states and a testing burden that non-payment features never have.
• Offline support. A mobile app that has to work without signal is roughly twice the work of one that doesn't. Sync conflicts are their own project.
• Roles and permissions. Two user types is a little work. Five, with overlapping rules about who sees which numbers, is a lot.
• Integrations. Anything that has to talk to a system you already own is priced after I have seen that system's documentation, never before.
• Migrating existing data. Old data is always messier than anyone remembers. This is frequently the most underestimated line in a project.

What is never included

Third-party costs are billed to you, by those third parties, at whatever they charge. I do not mark them up, and I do not absorb them:

• Cloud hosting and databases.
• Domain registration and renewal.
• Apple's ₹8,000-ish yearly developer fee and Google's one-time Play Console fee, if you are publishing apps.
• Payment gateway commission on every transaction.
• SMS and WhatsApp message costs — small individually, real at volume.
• Any paid API or library the project needs.

For a small MVP these usually land somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand rupees a month. I will give you an estimate before we start, and I would rather over-estimate it.

The question worth asking

Not "how much is an app?" — nobody can answer that honestly. Ask instead: what is the smallest version of this that would be worth paying for, and what would that cost? That question has a real answer, and getting to it is what the free call is for.

If a quote arrives without questions attached to it, it is a guess wearing a suit.