MVP Development Company

Ortem Technologies is a US-based MVP development company that has shipped MVPs for startups and internal ventures since 2012 — across B2B SaaS, marketplaces, FinTech, healthcare, and AI-native products. Our clients range from solo founders scoping their first product to enterprise innovation teams validating a new line of business before committing a full engineering org to it.

An MVP is not a cut-down version of your product idea — it is the smallest version of your product that lets you learn something real from actual users. The discipline is in deciding what to leave out without leaving out anything that changes what you'd learn. Most founders get this wrong in one of two directions: they build a prototype and call it an MVP (no real backend, cannot onboard a real user), or they build a "full" product and run out of runway before they learn whether anyone wants it.

What actually goes into an MVP build

Feature prioritisation: Before any design work, we map your core user journey and ruthlessly cut everything that isn't load-bearing for that journey. A feature earns its place in the MVP by answering: does removing this change what we learn from the first 100 users? If not, it waits for v2.

Production-grade from day one: Every MVP we ship has a real database, real authentication, and a deployment pipeline — not a demo environment. The architecture is chosen so that the features you cut for v1 can be added later without a rewrite. Cutting scope should never mean cutting architectural quality.

Investor and user-facing readiness: Analytics and event tracking are wired in from the first sprint, not bolted on before a demo day. Every MVP ships with the retention and activation metrics a founder needs to make the next fundraising or roadmap decision with real data instead of guesses.

Typical MVP cost and timeline

A focused MVP — one platform (web, iOS, or Android), core feature set, authentication, and a basic backend API — runs $25,000–$75,000 over 8–12 weeks. Where you land in that range depends mainly on integration count: a product with one payment provider and no third-party data sources costs less than one integrating five external APIs and a compliance requirement like HIPAA or PCI-DSS. Cross-platform mobile (Flutter, one codebase for iOS and Android) typically costs less than building native iOS and Android as two separate tracks.

Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute scoping call that produces a fixed-price estimate before you commit to anything. You don't sign a contract to find out what your MVP costs.

Choosing the right stack for your MVP

We select the stack based on your product requirements, not our convenience or a default template. Most web-based MVPs run on React or Next.js with Node.js or Python (FastAPI/Django) on the backend, hosted on AWS or GCP. Mobile MVPs default to Flutter when the product needs iOS and Android simultaneously on a startup budget — one codebase, both stores — or native Swift/Kotlin when the product needs platform-specific APIs (HealthKit, ARKit, Camera2) from day one. We avoid proprietary frameworks and vendor lock-in: the code and infrastructure are yours to take anywhere after handoff.

What you own at the end

We sign a mutual NDA before any scoping discussion, and every engagement includes a full IP Assignment Agreement transferring all code, designs, and assets to you on day one. We never retain rights to anything we build. At handoff you receive the complete source code, infrastructure credentials, and technical documentation — whether you're taking the product to an internal team or hiring your first engineers.

Ready to scope your MVP? Book a free 30-minute scoping call → We'll review your idea, outline what's actually load-bearing for v1, and give you a transparent timeline and cost estimate before you commit to anything.