Web development for startups

Often, yes — but scope them separately. A marketing site is a design-and-content problem; a product is an engineering problem. The same developer can do both, but quoting them as one blob hides which half the money went to. Get two scopes from one engagement if you can, so you can pause either side without unwinding both.

Whichever mainstream stack your developer is strongest in. MVPs die from scope and iteration speed, not from framework choice. The only hard rules: something you can hire for when the founder is no longer the whole product team, something with hosting that scales down as easily as up, and something boring enough that the second developer you hire does not have to rewrite it.

Write down the one workflow the product exists for, and make everything else explicitly out of scope. Ask the developer to quote the workflow alone, then price the "later" features separately as a roadmap — you will find most of them are cheaper after launch, once real users have voted on what matters. A developer who will not draw this line is pricing your indecision, not your product.

Enough that users trust it, no further. A clean, fast, unremarkable interface beats a beautiful one that shipped three months late. Budget design time where trust is transactional — checkout, signup, anything handling money or data — and let the rest be functional until usage tells you where polish pays.