Buyer's guide

How to compare MVP studios without taking anyone's word for it.

We are one of the options on this page, so read it accordingly. What we have tried to do is make it useful even if you hire someone else: the six questions below work on any studio, including us, and the comparison contains only figures each studio published themselves.

Talk to us Where we are the wrong choice

The six questions

What actually differs between studios

Portfolios all look similar and every studio claims senior engineers. These are the six answers that genuinely separate them, and you can ask all six in one call.

What is actually fixed in the price

A fixed price that excludes the backend is not a fixed price. Put every quote against the same product path and check design, backend, database, admin, payments, deployment, testing, monitoring, app-store work and handover individually.

What gets cut to hit the date

Every fast studio compresses something. If the answer is a named list of features, that is scoping and it is fine. If the answer is vague, the compression is happening in code review, testing or documentation, and you inherit it.

Who reads the code before it ships

Ask whether anything reaches production without a second person reading it. A studio that cannot answer this is selling you one person's judgement with no check on it, whatever the arrangement is called.

When you own the repository

From day one, or on final payment. The difference only matters in the exact situation where you would rather not be having the conversation, which is why it is worth settling before you start.

What happens in the month after launch

Launch is when real users find what testing missed. If there is no answer here, or it appears as a surprise invoice, that is the month you will feel it.

Whether they will tell you no

Ask directly which projects they turn away. A studio that claims to be right for everything has not thought about it, or is willing to take work it cannot do well. Both cost you the same.

First, the category

Most agency comparison lists mix up three different businesses

This is the mistake that costs founders the most money. Design agencies, development shops and product engineering studios are not competing for the same job, and a list that ranks them against each other is not telling you anything useful.

Design agencies

Musemind, Bold Studio and most of the studios that appear in Dubai and Lebanon agency listicles. They do research, wireframes, interface and brand. Hire them when the hard part of your product is what it looks like and how it feels, or when you need a marketing site that converts. They are genuinely better at that than we are.

Development shops

Teams who take a finished specification and build it. Usually cheaper per hour than a studio, and the right answer when you already know exactly what you want and can judge whether it was built properly. The risk is that nobody is accountable for whether the spec was right.

Product engineering studios

Us, IgnytLabs and a handful of others. Scoping, design, build, launch and what happens after, owned by one team against a date. Hire this when you need the whole thing to exist and work, and you do not have the internal capacity to specify and review it yourself.

Published figures

What each studio states publicly

Only what the studio publishes on its own site, linked so you can verify it. Nothing here is estimated or inferred. Checked on 26 July 2026, and prices change, so confirm before you decide.

HyperBrain Labs

This is us

Full-stack product engineering

Gurgaon, India. Clients in India, US, UK and the Gulf.

Founders who need a working product live against a date, or an existing AI-built app that is failing in production.

Published pricing: Production MVP from $3,999, fixed one-time. Growth Retainer $2,999/month. First rescue audit free.
Stated timeline: 21 days for a clearly scoped build.

That is us. Everything here is checkable against the rest of this site.

See our pricing in full

IgnytLabs

Full-stack MVP development

Remote.

Founders who prefer retained monthly capacity to a fixed-scope sprint, and who also want landing-page design.

Published pricing: MVP development “Starting at $5,497”, stated as 60 hours per month. Landing page design $1,997 to $3,497.
Stated timeline: “Our fastest launch? 14 days. Our average? 21.”

The closest direct comparison to us on this page, because they build full-stack products rather than design them. They publish outcome figures we do not currently match.

Visit their site and check for yourself

Bold Studio

Web design and Framer development

Dubai, UAE.

Businesses that need a sharp, fast marketing site rather than a product with a backend.

Published pricing: Publishes “$950+” on its own comparison table.
Stated timeline: Not published as a single figure.

A design studio, not an engineering one. If what you need is a conversion-focused website in Arabic and English, this is a closer fit than we are and we would say so.

Visit their site and check for yourself

Musemind

UI/UX design

Global, with a large distributed design team.

Teams that need deep user research, wireframing and interface design, including for enterprise and B2B software.

Published pricing: “Our solution normally starts from $5,000”, with a bespoke proposal per project.
Stated timeline: “15 Days to 6 months for a project to finish”, depending on scope.

A design agency with far more design depth than we have. If the hard part of your product is the interface and the research behind it, they are doing something we do not.

Visit their site and check for yourself

This list is short because we only include studios whose pricing and timelines are published and verifiable. Adding names we could not source, or assigning them scores we invented, would make the page longer and worth less.

Being straight about it

Where other studios beat us

A comparison page written by one of the options is only worth reading if it contains this section.

Retained monthly capacity

IgnytLabs prices MVP work as a monthly retainer with a stated hour allocation. If your scope genuinely is not knowable up front, that model fits better than our fixed sprint, and we would rather you took it than bought a fixed price for work nobody can scope yet.

Published client outcome numbers

Some studios publish aggregate figures for funding their clients raised after launch. We have one client outcome we can name, so we name that one and no more. If aggregate outcome data is what you are weighing, others currently publish more of it.

Certified compliance

We hold no SOC 2 or HIPAA certification and run no regulated-industry audit programme. If a certificate is a procurement requirement, an enterprise firm is the right answer and no amount of process description substitutes for the badge.

Design-led brand work

Studios whose core practice is visual identity and marketing sites will out-design us on a brochure site. We are an engineering studio. If the product is the interface and there is little behind it, hire the design studio.

And where we are strong

What we would put up against anyone

A fixed price that includes the backend

$3,999 covers scoping, design, frontend, backend, database, auth, payments, admin, deployment, handover and two weeks of fixes. Agreed in writing before we build, and re-quoted before we build if scope changes.

Externally verifiable proof

We built the app behind a Shark Tank India Season 5 pitch, which scaled to 50,000+ users across 20+ cities. A client raised $3M after we shipped theirs. Those are checkable by someone who is not us.

We repair broken builds for a living

App Rescue is a working part of the studio, not a marketing line. A team paid to diagnose collapsed AI-generated apps has a specific credibility on shortcut engineering, and it is why we do not ship them.

We run our own products

SwiftPatch, an over-the-air deployment platform for React Native, and NovaX. Live products we cannot walk away from hold us to the standard we are describing.

FAQ

About this page

Why is this page not a ranked list with you at number one?+

Because those lists are written by whoever is at number one, and readers know it. We have ordered by who each option suits instead. If you want the honest version of where we lose, it is on this page under where others beat us, and in more detail on our boundaries page.

Why are there no scores or percentages in the comparison?+

Because we would have to invent them. Comparison pages routinely assign competitors a number for something like design quality with no stated methodology, which is fabricated data about another company. Everything factual here is something the studio published themselves, linked, with the date we checked it.

How do I compare quotes that look very different?+

Put them against the same product path and check line by line whether design, backend, database, admin, payments, deployment, testing, monitoring, app-store work and handover are each included. A lower headline that omits the backend is not a cheaper offer, it is a smaller one. Then ask each studio what specifically gets cut to hit the date.

What if none of these fit?+

Then hire in-house or use a freelancer, and we have written honestly about when each of those is the better choice. The most expensive outcome here is not picking the wrong studio, it is buying a fixed-scope build while your product direction is still open.

Ask us the six questions

Twenty minutes, with the person who would write the code. If another studio on this page fits you better, we will say so rather than pitch you.

Book the call