Solutions advisor
Scope your build
Answer a handful of questions about what you are making and we will tell you which of our services actually fits. It takes about two minutes, and you get a straight answer at the end, even when that answer is that you do not need us yet.
- No email needed to see your recommendation
- No AI guessing. Just questions with honest answers behind them
- Nothing here you need a technical background to answer
How we decide what to recommend
Most studios answer every enquiry with a yes and a proposal. That is how a simple internal tool ends up quoted like a platform, and how a regulated fintech ends up squeezed into a two-week sprint that was never going to hold it.
So the questions here are not about your budget or your timeline. They are about who uses the thing, what happens when it gets something wrong, whether money moves through it, and where its information comes from. Those four answers tell us more about what a build actually takes than any technical checklist would, and you can answer all of them without knowing what multi-tenant means. Working that out is the part you would be paying us for.
Some answers end the conversation early on purpose. If a product could harm someone or hold money that is not yours, it needs a security specialist who did not write the code. If it only works with people on both sides of a marketplace, the risk is demand rather than software, and a working build proves nothing until someone turns up. If you have a date that a full build will not meet, the honest sequence is a prototype now and the build behind it.
You can also skip all of this and just talk to us, or read how the same thinking played out on real projects. If you are raising rather than building, the funding readiness assessment is the better place to start.
Common questions
- What is the difference between a prototype and an MVP?
- A prototype is a clickable, high-fidelity simulation of a product. It looks and feels real, it is ideal for testing an idea with users or showing investors, and nothing behind it actually works. An MVP is working software: real people can use it to do a real job. A prototype answers "should we build this?" and an MVP answers "does this work in the world?". At SmplCo a prototype takes five working days and costs £8,100. An MVP starts at ten days and is scoped on a call.
- How long does it take to build an MVP?
- It depends almost entirely on how much your product has to be responsible for. One core user journey, ordinary personal data and no payments can be built and shipped in a fixed ten-day sprint. Verified identity, money moving between third parties, an app store release, multi-tenant architecture or an integration with your existing systems all push it into a full MVP, which runs weeks to months and gets scoped before it gets quoted.
- Can you build an MVP with payments in ten days?
- Taking simple card payments, where a customer pays you through a proper payment provider, can fit inside a ten-day build. Holding, splitting or moving other people’s money cannot. Marketplace payouts, wallets, escrow and lending all need architecture decided up front and code reviewed by someone who did not write it, so they become a full MVP with an independent security review.
- How much does it cost to build an MVP?
- A 5 Day Prototype is £8,100. A 10 Day MVP and a full MVP are both scoped on a call and then quoted, because a fixed price on work nobody has scoped is a guess that one of us pays for later. The scoping conversation is where the shape of the work gets agreed, and for complex builds it is built into the proposal rather than given away.
- Who owns the code and the IP?
- You do. Every engagement ships the code to your own GitHub, and all intellectual property generated belongs to you. That applies to prototypes, MVPs and internal tools alike.
- What if my idea is too complex for a fixed scope?
- Then the tool will say so, and so will we. Roughly half the paths through these questions end somewhere other than a fixed sprint, including one that recommends proving demand with a prototype before building anything, and one that recommends nothing from us at all. Selling a ten-day sprint that cannot survive contact with the requirements means you pay twice.