MVPs fail in the spreadsheet, not the codebase. Founders underestimate scope, overestimate speed, and pay twice for the handoff between design and development.
The first leak is building too much. An MVP should prove one hypothesis. If your v1 includes admin panels, analytics dashboards, and five user roles, you are building a product, not testing an idea.
The second leak is wrong platform choice. A marketing site, a cross-platform app, and a CMS-backed product have different costs. Picking Flutter when you need WordPress — or Next.js when you need native mobile — adds weeks with no learning benefit.
The third leak is multi-vendor workflows. Designer delivers Figma, developer quotes rebuild time separately, and neither owns the gap between them. That gap often costs 20 to 40 percent of the total budget.
Fixed-price MVPs without defined screen counts invite scope creep. Either the vendor cuts quality or the project stalls at change request number twelve.
A realistic MVP budget includes discovery, design, build, one revision round, and one week post-launch. Anything that skips discovery is betting on luck.
Zero Handoff exists partly to remove the third leak. One person, one quote, one timeline.