The True Cost of Vibe-Coded MVPs | What Founders Need to Know
Honest breakdown of vibe coding costs for startups. Learn about hidden technical debt, security risks, and maintenance costs of AI-generated codebases.
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The Pitch Is Real
Let’s start with the part that is true: vibe coding is genuinely impressive for getting a working prototype in front of people. You describe what you want to Claude or Cursor, accept the output, and in a weekend you have something that looks like a product. Screens load. Buttons do things. Data saves.
For a demo, a pitch deck, or a proof of concept, that is legitimately valuable. We have seen founders validate ideas in days that would have taken months to test through traditional development. The speed-to-learning ratio is unmatched.
The problem is not vibe coding itself. The problem is the gap between what you have after a vibe-coding session and what you need to run a business on.
The Demo-to-Production Gap
A demo needs to work once, on your machine, in front of a friendly audience. A production application needs to work thousands of times, on everyone’s machine, under conditions you did not anticipate.
That gap has a cost, and founders consistently underestimate it. Not because they are naive, but because the demo feels so close to done. If 90% of the features work, surely the last 10% is just a weekend of polish?
It is not. The last 10% of functionality requires roughly 50% of the total effort. And beyond features, there is an entire category of work that vibe coding skips entirely: security hardening, error handling, performance optimization, test coverage, deployment automation, monitoring, and logging. None of these show up in a demo. All of them show up in production.
We call this the “iceberg problem.” The demo is the tip — visible, impressive, shareable. Below the waterline sits everything that makes software actually work: input validation, graceful error recovery, database migrations, environment configuration, logging, alerting, backup strategies, and the hundred small decisions that separate a prototype from a product.
Vibe coding builds the tip. The iceberg below still needs to be built by someone who understands production systems. And unlike the tip, the iceberg does not get cheaper the longer you wait to address it.
The Hidden Costs
We have audited enough vibe-coded projects to put rough numbers on the categories of debt they accumulate. These are not worst-case scenarios — they are averages from real client engagements.
Security Remediation: $5,000-$15,000
AI-generated code optimizes for functionality, not security. The patterns we find repeatedly — hardcoded API keys, client-side-only auth checks, unparameterized database queries, missing rate limiting — each take 2-8 hours to properly fix once they are entangled in a codebase.
The fix is rarely just “move the API key to an environment variable.” The key was hardcoded because there is no secret management system. There is no secret management system because there is no deployment pipeline. There is no deployment pipeline because the application was deployed manually once and never updated. Each fix reveals the next missing layer.
A single security incident costs orders of magnitude more. The average data breach for a small business runs $120,000-$150,000 according to IBM’s annual report. Even a minor incident — exposed API keys, leaked user emails — can kill a startup’s reputation before it has one.
This is not hypothetical risk. We have been called in after incidents. It is always more expensive than prevention would have been.
Test Coverage: $8,000-$20,000
Vibe-coded projects ship with zero tests. Not minimal tests, not inadequate tests — literally none. This means every change is a gamble. Every new feature might break an existing one, and you will not know until a user reports it.
Retrofitting tests onto a codebase that was not designed for testability is significantly more expensive than writing tests alongside the code. Components are tightly coupled. Business logic is mixed into UI layers. Database calls are hardcoded instead of injected. You have to refactor before you can even write the test.
The cost compounds over time. Without tests, development velocity degrades roughly 15-20% per month as the team spends increasing time on manual QA and bug fixes.
Architectural Refactoring: $10,000-$30,000
This is the big one. Vibe-coded projects accumulate structural debt at an extraordinary rate because each prompt is answered in isolation. You end up with three different state management approaches, two authentication systems, and business logic scattered across dozens of files with no discernible organization.
Untangling this requires an experienced developer to map the codebase, identify the seams, and carefully extract and consolidate logic without breaking existing functionality. It is painstaking work, and there are no shortcuts.
The alternative — continuing to build on a fractured architecture — is more expensive in the long run. Every new feature takes longer, introduces more bugs, and makes the eventual reckoning worse.
Dependency Bloat: $2,000-$5,000
This one surprises founders. Vibe-coded projects tend to accumulate dependencies aggressively. Each prompt might introduce a new library for something the existing stack already handles. We have audited projects with 15 date-handling libraries, three different CSS solutions, and multiple HTTP clients all doing the same job.
Every unnecessary dependency is a maintenance liability. It increases bundle size, slows build times, and creates security exposure — a vulnerability in any one of those packages is your vulnerability now. Cleaning up the dependency tree, consolidating duplicate functionality, and updating outdated packages is tedious but necessary work.
Ongoing Maintenance Overhead: 2-3x Normal
Even after remediation, vibe-coded projects carry higher ongoing costs. The codebase has patterns and conventions that no single person designed, making onboarding slower. Dependencies are often outdated or unnecessarily numerous. The deployment pipeline, if one exists, is fragile.
We typically see maintenance costs for remediated vibe-coded projects settle at 1.5-2x the rate of a conventionally built application for the first 6-12 months, gradually normalizing as the codebase matures.
For context, typical ongoing maintenance for a well-built SaaS MVP runs $2,000-$5,000 per month. For a freshly remediated vibe-coded project, expect $4,000-$10,000 per month until the codebase stabilizes. That delta adds up quickly over a year.
The Total Picture
Here is a realistic cost scenario for a typical vibe-coded MVP — a SaaS application with user auth, a dashboard, integrations, and a payment flow.
Initial vibe coding: $0-$500 (your time, plus AI subscription costs)
Making it production-ready:
- Security remediation: $8,000
- Test coverage for critical paths: $12,000
- Architectural refactoring: $15,000
- Dependency cleanup: $3,000
- Deployment and infrastructure setup: $3,000
- Performance optimization: $4,000
Total remediation: ~$45,000
Ongoing elevated maintenance (first year): $24,000-$60,000 above normal
Building it properly from the start: ~$30,000-$50,000
The numbers overlap, and that is the point. Vibe coding does not save money on the total project. It shifts costs from upfront development to downstream remediation, usually at a premium because fixing is harder than building. What it does save is time-to-demo, and for certain situations, that tradeoff makes sense.
There is also an opportunity cost that does not show up in these numbers. Every week your team spends remediating vibe-coded debt is a week they are not building new features. For a startup racing to find product-market fit, that lost velocity can be the difference between closing a round and running out of runway.
When Vibe Coding IS the Right Choice
We are not here to tell you vibe coding is always wrong. It is the right approach when:
You need to validate an idea before investing. If you are not sure whether anyone wants your product, spending $40,000 to find out is a bad bet. Vibe-code a prototype, show it to 50 potential customers, and get real feedback. If the idea is dead, you lost a weekend, not a budget.
The application is internal or disposable. Admin tools, data migration scripts, one-off analysis dashboards, event microsites — if the blast radius is small and the lifespan is short, production-grade engineering is overkill.
You are a technical founder exploring architecture. Vibe coding is excellent for rapid prototyping of different approaches. Build three versions of the same feature, see which architecture feels right, then build the real one properly.
You need a demo for fundraising. Investors want to see a working product. A vibe-coded demo that shows the vision is more convincing than slides, and cheaper than a production build you might pivot away from. Just be transparent about it — savvy investors will ask about your technical foundation, and “we prototyped fast and have a plan for production-grade development” is a strong answer.
When It Is Not
Vibe coding is the wrong choice when:
You are going directly to production with paying customers. If real users will depend on your application, the remediation costs are not optional — they are just deferred. And deferred costs accrue interest in the form of user churn, security incidents, and developer frustration.
You are in a regulated industry. Healthcare, finance, insurance — these sectors have compliance requirements that vibe-coded applications cannot meet. HIPAA, SOC 2, and PCI-DSS demand audit trails, access controls, and security practices that are not generated by default.
You have already raised funding. If you have capital, spend it on building correctly. The cost difference between vibe-coded-then-remediated and built-properly is marginal, but the risk difference is enormous. Investors expect their money to build durable assets, not prototypes.
Your product IS the technology. If your competitive advantage is technical — a novel algorithm, a real-time processing pipeline, a complex integration — vibe coding will produce a version that looks right but does not actually work at scale.
You plan to hire engineers soon. Nothing demoralizes a new engineering hire faster than inheriting a vibe-coded codebase. The first thing they will tell you is that it needs to be rewritten, and they will be at least partially right. If you are about to invest in a team, invest in giving them a foundation worth building on.
What a Professional Rescue Looks Like
If you are sitting on a vibe-coded application that has outgrown its prototype origins, the path forward is not a panic rewrite. It is a structured process.
We start with an audit: what works, what is dangerous, and what is just messy. We prioritize ruthlessly — security issues first, architectural bottlenecks second, code quality third. Then we execute a remediation plan that keeps your application running while we fix it underneath.
This is important: we do not stop your product development to fix everything. Good remediation happens alongside feature work. We stabilize one module while your team continues building in another. The application never goes dark, and your users never notice the transition.
The goal is always to get you to a codebase that a professional development team can maintain and extend at normal velocity. Not perfection — functionality, security, and sustainability.
Most remediation engagements take 4-8 weeks. At the end, you have a production-grade application with tests, proper security, clean architecture, and a deployment pipeline. More importantly, you have a foundation you can build on without fear.
We have written extensively about the maintenance process itself if you want the technical details. But the first step is always understanding where you stand — and that starts with a conversation.
If that sounds like where you are, our maintenance and rescue service exists specifically for this situation.
The Honest Math
Vibe coding is a tool, not a strategy. Like any tool, its value depends on context. A hammer is perfect for nails and terrible for screws.
The founders who get the most value from vibe coding are the ones who understand what it costs — not just the subscription fee, but the full lifecycle cost of the code it produces. They use it for validation, not for production. They budget for remediation before they need it. And they bring in professionals before the technical debt becomes a technical crisis.
The true cost of a vibe-coded MVP is not zero. It is not even cheap. But when used deliberately, with eyes open and a plan for what comes after the demo, it can be the fastest path to a real product. The key word is “path” — not “destination.”
If you are planning a vibe-coded prototype and want to avoid the most expensive mistakes, or if you already have one and need to figure out what comes next, we are happy to talk. The consultation is free, and the honest assessment might save you more than the remediation ever would.