Startup cost: $0 - $35k

It really depends on your goals and whether you’re technical. If you are, your main investment is just time because you can build most of it yourself. If you’re not technical, you’re usually looking at around $20K–$30K to hire someone, unless you partner with a technical friend and trade equity instead of cash. And if you’re vibe-coding with AI tools, you can start way cheaper, though you’ll still pay for basic things like hosting, tools, and support software.

In my case, since neither of us were technical, we ended up spending around $70K total, $35K on a bad agency MVP and another $35K on a Harvard engineer, plus a few months of polishing before we could even launch