Mayson's free tier costs nothing and needs no card to start, and its paid tiers, Go and Pro, still cost far less than even a modest freelance developer quote, and a fraction of a full-time hire. The comparison holds cleanly at the MVP stage. It gets more nuanced once your product needs ongoing custom engineering work that a fixed-scope tool isn't built to provide.

What Mayson actually costs, tier by tier

Three tiers, as of 2026: Free, Go, and Pro.

Free gives you 10 credits, 2,000 API requests a month, limited third-party integrations, and no collaborators. No credit card required to start. This is enough to build and deploy something real and test whether your idea has legs before you've spent a rupee.

Go steps up to 40 credits, 200,000 API requests a month with no rate limiting, three collaborators, code export and download, and pre-built integrations. This is the tier built for actually shipping something to real users rather than just testing the water.

Pro goes to 200 credits, the same 200,000 API request ceiling, eight collaborators, and a full week of logging retention instead of Go's 24 hours. This is the tier for a team that's past validation and running a real product day to day.

What I can tell you with confidence, having gone through this myself: even without the exact rupee figure in front of you, credits and API limits at this scale cost meaningfully less than a single freelance invoice for comparable scope, let alone a monthly salary. See current Mayson pricing for the exact numbers before you commit to a tier.

What hiring a developer actually costs, freelance and full-time

Freelance developer rates in India currently sit somewhere between $15 and $75 an hour depending on experience, which works out to roughly ₹1,400 to ₹7,000 an hour at current exchange rates. A basic MVP build easily runs 80 to 150 hours once you account for revisions, which puts a freelance quote anywhere from a little over a lakh to several lakhs, depending entirely on who you hire and how well you scoped the brief going in.

Full-time hiring is a different order of cost. Junior software developer salaries in India currently average somewhere between ₹4 lakh and ₹5 lakh a year, based on recent data across Glassdoor, Indeed, and PayScale, with a typical range running from roughly ₹3 lakh at the low end to ₹8 to 10 lakh for developers with two to four years of experience. That's the quoted salary. The actual cost to your business runs higher once you add provident fund contributions, gratuity, and the time you or someone on your team spends recruiting, interviewing, and managing the hire once they're in the seat.

The distinction that matters: a freelancer is a project cost. A full-time hire is a standing monthly cost whether or not there's active work to justify it that month.

The costs that don't show up on either invoice

I've written elsewhere about the ₹12,000 I spent on a Fiverr developer who delivered a Figma mockup and disappeared. The short version: the invoice is never the whole story with a freelancer. Revisions cost extra once you're past the first round. A freelancer going quiet mid-project means someone else has to spend paid hours just understanding what's already there before they can add to it. And you don't always own a clean, transferable codebase unless you were specific about that upfront.

Full-time hiring has its own hidden costs, less visible because they don't show up as a single number. Onboarding takes weeks before a new hire is genuinely productive. A bad hire costs you the salary, the onboarding time, and the months it takes to notice the fit isn't right, plus the time to hire again. Even a good hire needs management, which is its own quiet drain on a founder's time, especially when you're not technical enough to evaluate their work directly.

AI app builders have a hidden cost worth naming honestly too. Credit-based pricing across this category can burn faster than a first-time user expects, particularly during heavy iteration on a complex feature. It's worth watching your credit usage in the first few sessions rather than assuming the sticker price is the whole picture, the same way you'd watch a freelancer's hours or a new hire's ramp-up time.

Where the price gap matters most: MVP stage vs scaling stage

At the validation stage, before you know if your idea works, the gap between Mayson and either hiring option is close to its widest. You're testing a hypothesis, not committing to infrastructure. Spending freelancer or full-time money to validate an unproven idea is the exact mistake my Fiverr experience taught me to stop making. A free or low-cost tier that gets you to a real, testable product is worth more at this stage than a more capable but expensive option you can't yet justify.

Once you're past validation and scaling a product with real users, the comparison shifts. You may need Go or Pro-level credits to support the traffic and features a growing product needs. You may also start hitting the specific complexity ceilings where a tool alone isn't enough, and that's exactly when hiring starts to make sense again, not as a replacement for what you built, but as an addition to it.

When paying for a developer is still the right call

Even at a much higher cost, hiring is sometimes the right decision, and pretending otherwise isn't honest advice.

Ongoing maintenance on a product with real, paying users benefits from someone accountable who knows the codebase deeply and is available when something breaks. Complex custom integrations, particularly with poorly documented third-party systems, need a person who can sit with the specific mess rather than a tool working from common patterns. And a genuine technical co-founder relationship, someone with equity and long-term stake in the outcome rather than a one-off deliverable, is a different kind of investment entirely, one no pricing tier is designed to replace.

If you're at the stage where any of these apply, the cost conversation has already changed. You're not asking "what's cheapest" anymore. You're asking what a specific ongoing relationship is worth to your specific product, which is a harder and more honest question.

How to run the numbers on your specific idea

Work out three numbers before you decide anything.

Your Mayson cost: estimate the credits your build will realistically need, based on the scope of your idea, and check that against the current tier pricing.

Your freelance cost: get an actual quote, in writing, with a specific scope, not a vague "how much for an app like this." Multiply the hourly rate by a realistic hour estimate, and add a buffer for revisions, because the first estimate is rarely the last one.

Your full-time cost: take the annual salary for the experience level you'd need, add roughly 25-30 percent for statutory contributions and overhead as a rough planning figure, and divide by twelve to see what that commitment costs you every month whether or not there's enough work to fill it.

Compare those three numbers against where you actually are: validating an unproven idea, building toward real users, or already scaling something that works. The right answer changes with the stage, not just the price tag.

You can start with the free tier, no credit card required, and get your actual Mayson number before you commit to either of the other two paths. It's the cheapest research you'll do in this whole process.

FAQ

Abhishek is a strategy consultant and non-technical founder who shipped his first SaaS product over a weekend in 2025 after a long false-start phase. He still consults during the week. He writes about the practical mechanics of building without a technical co-founder.