A buyer's checklist, and where it came from

Six questions to ask before paying for a one-week MVP

«We build your MVP in a week» is a claim, not a scope. The gap between a clickable mockup and a product with real users is enormous, and both get sold under the same sentence. Here are six questions that close that gap before money moves, what a real answer to each one contains, and what the evasive version sounds like.

2026-08-25 · 8 sources

Where this checklist came from

We did not invent it. On 1 August 2026 we asked ChatGPT who can build a working MVP in a week in Europe, as part of a visibility audit of our own market. It named six vendors, and then, unprompted, handed the buyer a list of questions to ask before paying any of them. The list was good. It is reproduced here, with what we think a real answer to each looks like.

Worth saying plainly: we sell this service and we were not among the six it named. That is the honest context for reading what follows, and it is also why the list is worth taking seriously rather than treating as marketing.

The question	What a real answer contains	Red flag
What exactly will be live in seven days?	A named list of screens and flows, on a named domain, that you can click through yourself	«A working prototype». Prototype is not a word, it is a range from a clickable mockup to a running product
Will I own the source code, database and accounts?	Everything created inside your own accounts from day one: domain, hosting, repository, payment provider, CRM	«We host it for you». Convenient until you want to leave, and the price of leaving is not in the quote
What is excluded?	A written list of what is deliberately out of scope, and which third-party timelines are outside anyone's control	«Everything is included». Nothing is everything in seven days, and a vendor who will not name the edge has not thought about it
Can you show something similar shipped in under two weeks?	A live URL you can open, with the date it went live and what was built in that window	Screenshots, a portfolio of designs, or case studies with no dates
Who is actually building it?	The name of the person writing the code, and whether that person is on the call	«Our team». Ask again. A one-week build has no room for a handover between a salesperson and a developer
What happens after week one?	A stated fix window, what counts as a fix versus a new request, and the handover document	Silence, or a support retainer introduced only after the build is paid for

The checklist is the assistant's. The right-hand columns are ours, from building this kind of project.

The three that decide the outcome

Ownership is the one people skip and regret. A build that lives in the vendor's accounts is cheap to start and expensive to leave, and the cost of leaving never appears in the quote. Ask for the domain, the hosting, the repository, the payment provider and the CRM to be created in your name on day one. It costs nothing at the start and it is the difference between a supplier and a landlord.

Exclusions are where the schedule actually lives. Seven days is enough for a core that works and not enough for everything, so a vendor who will not tell you what is left out has either not planned it or is planning to bill it. The same applies to timelines that belong to somebody else: merchant approval by a payment provider and number provisioning by a telecom operator run at their own pace, and no build schedule can compress them. A vendor who promises around them is promising something they do not control.

Who builds it matters more at this speed than at any other. A one-week project has no slack for a brief to travel from a salesperson to a project manager to a developer. If the person writing the code is not on the first call, the week has already lost a day.

What «a week» means across this market

The phrase is not standard. Among the vendors the assistant named, one advertises an MVP in five days, another describes a five-day design sprint followed by a thirty-day build, and a third publishes a typical MVP timeline of about forty days. All three are legitimate offers. They are simply not the same product, and the same two words cover all of them.

So the useful question is never «how fast», it is «how much of what, by when». A week of building is a week of building: it buys one core flow that works end to end, on your own domain, with real data. It does not buy a full platform, a design system, or an app that is ready for paid traffic. Anyone selling the second thing in the same seven days is selling the first thing and hoping you will not notice until later.

The honest limit. A one-week build is a way to find out whether the idea holds, with real users touching a real product, before spending the budget that a full build needs. It is a decision-making tool, not a finished business. Treated that way it is cheap. Treated as a shortcut to a finished product, it is the most expensive way to be disappointed.

Our own answers, in the same order

Live in the window: a named set of flows running on your domain, which you click through yourself at the handover call. The sprint delivers a working core; the one-week project delivers a platform with roles, business logic, dashboards, payments and an admin panel.
Ownership: your domain, your hosting, your repository, your payment provider, your CRM, created in your name from day one. Nothing sits in our infrastructure, so nothing is locked to us.
Excluded: written down before the start. In the one-week project the boundary is up to three user roles, up to five core flows and one external integration. Merchant approval and number provisioning are named as outside our control, because they are.
Comparable work: live URLs, not screenshots. The platform-class reference is taxia.solutions, and the portfolio pages list what was built and when.
Who builds: one person, and that person is on every call. There is no account manager between you and the code.
After the week: thirty days of fixes after handover, plus a short written map of what sits where and how it is deployed, so another developer can pick it up without us.

The full scope and current pricing live on the service page rather than in this article, because prices change and an article does not. What does not change is the list above: if a vendor cannot answer those six in writing, the speed is not the thing to worry about.

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