How Much Does It Cost to Start a Startup?

Founders almost always ask the wrong version of this question. "How much does it cost to start a startup?" sounds like it should have a single number — a setup fee you pay once and then you're in business. It doesn't work that way.

The truth is that incorporating and turning on your tools is cheap. You can be legally formed, banked, and shipping a first version for a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. The expensive part is staying alive long enough to find something that works. The real cost of a startup is time and runway, not setup fees.

This guide gives you an itemized, realistic breakdown in plain USD ranges — incorporation, legal, banking, tools, the MVP, early marketing, and the big one, your own living costs — and contrasts a lean bootstrapped start with a funded one.

The setup costs are smaller than you think

Let's start with the part founders overestimate. The legal and administrative cost of standing up a company is low, and it has only gotten lower with formation services.

If you incorporate a Delaware C-corp — the default for any company that plans to raise venture money — the direct state costs are modest. Filing the Certificate of Incorporation is around $100. The annual Delaware franchise tax plus the report is typically a few hundred dollars for an early-stage company using the assumed-par-value method (the alternative method can quote you an alarming five-figure number; ignore it, it's the wrong calculation for a startup). A registered agent runs roughly $50–$300 a year.

You can do this yourself, or you can pay a service to bundle it. Stripe Atlas charges a flat fee to incorporate, get your EIN, and generate the standard founder documents. Clerky is the more lawyer-favored alternative at a higher price point. Either removes a week of paperwork for the cost of a nice dinner.

$500

The mechanics of choosing a structure and filing are a topic of their own — if you're at that stage, read our walkthrough on how to incorporate a startup before you wire any money. And whatever you do, file your 83(b) election within 30 days of issuing founder stock; missing it is a free way to create a large future tax bill.

A realistic line-by-line breakdown

Here's what a typical early-stage software startup actually spends to get going. Ranges are deliberately wide because the honest answer is "it depends on how much you do yourself."

Add up everything except the last two rows and a lean founder is looking at hundreds of dollars to low thousands to be fully operational. That number is almost a rounding error next to runway.

The MVP: the line item that swings the most

The build is where budgets diverge wildly, so it deserves its own treatment. You have three broad paths, and the right one depends on what you're building and what you can do yourself.

• DIY / no-code: If you or a co-founder can build it, your out-of-pocket cost is mostly tools. No-code platforms (Bubble, Webflow, Softr) run roughly $30–$300 a month. A landing page plus a waitlist can cost almost nothing. Our guide on how to build an MVP covers scoping this down to the minimum.
• Freelancer: A capable freelance developer typically builds a focused first version for somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000, depending on scope and rate.
• Agency: A development shop will quote you $25,000 to $150,000 or more. Rarely the right call pre-traction.

The cheapest and most durable option is usually a technical co-founder rather than a paid build — someone with equity who keeps building after the first version ships. If that's your gap, it's worth doing deliberately; you can find a technical co-founder on Foundersbase instead of burning your entire budget on an agency.

The real cost: runway and time

Here's the part nobody puts on the invoice. Every month you work on the startup is a month you're either not earning a salary or paying yourself far less than your market rate. That opportunity cost dwarfs every other line item.

Do the math. If your personal living costs are $5,000 a month and you give the startup twelve months before it needs to support you, that's $60,000 of runway for one founder — before you've spent a dollar on the company itself. For two founders, double it. This is why the question isn't "what does it cost to start" but "how long can you afford to keep going."

The setup fee is a few hundred dollars. The real price tag is the year of your life you spend before the company can pay you back.

Managing that runway is a discipline in itself — knowing your burn, your zero-cash date, and what extends them. It's worth reading how to manage startup runway early, because most startups don't die from a big mistake; they die from quietly running out of months.

Bootstrapped vs. funded: two different price tags

The path you choose changes the shape of the cost, not just the size.

Bootstrapped. You cover everything yourself. Setup is cheap, the MVP is whatever you can build or afford, and your runway is your savings plus any income you keep. Many founders start this way while still employed — it stretches runway indefinitely at the cost of speed. If that's you, how to start a startup while working and the broader playbook in how to bootstrap a startup are the relevant reads. The advantage: you keep all your equity and answer to no one.

Funded. Raising a pre-seed or seed round doesn't make starting cheaper — it makes your runway longer in exchange for equity. The setup costs are identical; you've just bought yourself twelve to twenty-four months and usually the ability to pay yourself and early hires. The trade-off is dilution and the obligation to grow fast enough to justify the next round.

Neither is inherently better. Bootstrapping suits capital-light businesses that can reach revenue quickly; funding suits ideas that need scale before they make money. The cost question is really a strategy question, which is why it sits so close to the work of choosing a startup idea worth building in the first place.

What it actually costs, in one line

If you want a single takeaway: budget a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars to get legally set up and shipping, and then budget months of your living costs as the real expense. A lean solo founder can genuinely start for under $2,000 in hard costs. The same founder still needs $30,000–$80,000 of runway to give the idea a fair shot.

So the honest answer to "how much does it cost to start a startup?" is: very little to start, and a great deal to survive. Spend almost nothing on setup, protect your runway like it's the only resource that matters — because it is — and put every dollar you do spend toward the cheapest experiment that tells you whether this is worth another year of your life.