MVP development in Mumbai
A fintech MVP in Mumbai has two audiences. The users decide whether the product is wanted. The partner bank or NBFC, which holds the money and the lending book, decides whether it goes live, and its technology team arrives with detailed questions about how data is stored, who can reach it and how changes are tracked, which a quick prototype struggles to answer.
We build the smallest version that satisfies both. One journey that users will pay for, built in Next.js and Postgres on infrastructure in your name, with the logging, access control and change history a partner's technology team will ask to see. Nothing else is gold-plated. The point is to reach a partner signature and a first cohort of users without building a codebase your first engineering hire has to replace.
Mumbai is India's financial capital. Both major stock exchanges are here, and so are many of the country's banks, NBFCs, brokers, wealth managers, insurers and fintechs. For these companies software is judged first on whether the money is right. A loan ledger that drifts from the bank statement, a payout released twice because a partner timed out, a portfolio screen showing yesterday's price: each one lands on an operations desk the next morning. What they need built is rarely a new product from nothing. It is a lending or payments backend that reconciles, a platform where each role sees exactly what it should, and approvals that need two people before money moves. Engineers who have built those systems are in demand across the city, so the work often waits for a hire.
The city's second industry is attention. The Hindi film industry, most of the country's television networks and many of its large publishers are based here, and their software problems are specific: traffic that arrives all at once on a release or a match day, rights and metadata that decide what can be shown where, and archives that are valuable only if someone can search them. A slow page on a publisher's site is lost revenue, because the readers came from search and will go straight back to it.
The third is consumer business in every size. Mumbai has D2C brands selling beauty, fashion and food through their own stores and every marketplace at once, and it is home to large family-owned groups and conglomerates whose older divisions still run on spreadsheets and exports from their accounting software. In the bigger groups the buyer is usually a digital team with a mandate, a budget and a procurement process, and the work has to survive that process as well as production.
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so the working day is the same on both sides and a question asked in the morning is answered the same morning. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The work happens in your repository and a shared chat channel, where every decision is written down, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go rather than at the end.
We are the right fit when a Mumbai team has a defined piece of work and wants a senior engineer on it within days: a ledger that has to reconcile, a migration with an end date, or extra capacity while you hire. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or bring us in white-label for your agency's clients under your name.
Four ways this arrives.
Every feature is marked essential. We work with you to find the one journey a user must complete for the idea to be proven or disproven, build that properly, and write the rest down as a list for after launch.
It was built with a no-code tool or over a weekend, and real users are now finding its limits. We keep what works, move the data somewhere you own, and rebuild the parts that break without taking the product offline.
A demo that works in the meeting and then has to become the product. We build it on a real database with real sign-in from the start, so the version you demo is the version you keep, not a mock-up you throw away.
You need someone to make the technical decisions and explain them in plain language. We write down every choice that is expensive to reverse, why we made it and what changing it would cost, so whoever you hire next can pick it up.
Began in 2024 as a script that turned monthly exports into charts, and grew step by step into a web app, a mobile app, a technician phone page and the one backend under all three.
Read the write-up →Asked by Mumbai teams.
How do you work with teams in Mumbai?+
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so calls, reviews and releases fit inside your normal working day. We work in your tools, Slack, GitHub and Linear or whatever your team already uses, and every decision is written down in the repository or the channel. You talk directly to the engineer writing the code, from the first 30-minute call through to handover, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Mumbai lenders, brokers and fintechs?+
Yes. We build the parts where the money has to be right: loan and payment ledgers that reconcile against the bank's records every day, retries that cannot turn a timeout into a double payout, maker-checker approvals where a second person signs off before money moves, and a full history of every change of state. We work inside the system you already run, in Node, Python and Next.js, and ship in increments.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Mumbai?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Mumbai at about ₹15 lakh a year. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. That buys a senior engineer who writes the code, works in your Slack, GitHub and Linear, and starts within days, with no recruiting round, notice period or employment overhead. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on the output before committing to more.
Can you work white-label for our Mumbai agency?+
Yes. Mumbai's digital and media agencies bring us in when a client needs a backend, a mobile app or a data pipeline alongside the design and campaign work. We work under your name, in your client's repositories and your channels, and sign an NDA before specifics. The code belongs to the client from the first commit. You keep the relationship, we write the code and the runbooks, and your team presents the work.
What does the fixed-price two-week starter cover?+
A defined slice of the product, agreed in writing before we start. For an MVP it is usually the core flow, working end to end against a real database. It costs $2,800. You get something running at the end and you keep the code either way, so you can judge us on output before committing to the rest of the build.
How long does an MVP take?+
It depends on what the smallest honest version is, which is why we scope before we quote. The two-week starter usually answers the question: by the end of it one flow works, and you have a written estimate for the rest with its assumptions listed. We would rather cut scope with you than promise a date we would miss.
Why Next.js and PostgreSQL?+
Because they are boring in the right way. Both are widely known, so you can hire for them later. Postgres will carry you a long way past your first paying customers, and Next.js gives you a web app and an API in one codebase. If the product is mobile-first, we build the app in React Native on the same backend.
Will we have to rewrite it later?+
Not if we do our job. The shortcuts we take are in scope, not in structure: fewer features, plainer screens, manual steps behind the scenes. The data model, sign-in, permissions and deploys are built properly from the first week, because those are the parts that force a rewrite when they are wrong.
Who owns the code and the accounts?+
You do, from the first commit. Repositories, hosting, domains and payment accounts are created in your name, not ours. If we set something up ourselves to save time, we transfer it to you before the first invoice. An MVP you cannot take to another team is a liability, not an asset.