If someone is building your MVP in exchange for equity and taking little or no cash, 5% to 15% is the defensible range. Below 5% nobody serious will carry the risk. Above 15% you have quietly handed over a co-founder’s stake to a vendor, and your next investor will notice.
That range assumes two things: the equity vests over time, and it is sized against how much cash you are also paying. Get those two right and the percentage almost sets itself.
First, which question are you asking?
Two different deals get searched with the same words, and most of the advice online answers whichever one the writer had in mind.
Equity to someone you are hiring. A founding engineer, a first technical employee, a co-founder. They join the company, draw a salary or a reduced one, and stay. There is real published data on this, below.
Equity to a firm that builds the thing. An agency, a studio, a contractor. They deliver a product and their involvement ends, or converts into something smaller. Nobody joins anything.
The percentages are not comparable, and neither are the risks. If you are trying to work out what to offer a co-founder, the numbers here will read as far too high. This page is about the second deal.
Why the advice you find ranges from 0.1% to 50%
Search this question and you get chaos. Public threads on Quora and Blind contain a design agency asking 0.1% to 0.5% alongside an $8,000 monthly retainer, individual developers negotiating 8% to 50%, and confident advice that you must offer at least 25%. One agency blog says one thing, the next says the opposite.
The answers conflict because they are answering different questions. A partner paid full rate in cash is taking almost no risk and should get almost no equity. A partner paid nothing is taking all of it and should be treated as a founder. Most real deals sit between those poles, and the percentage is just where you landed on that slope.
So stop asking what the market rate is. Ask what the person is actually carrying.
What the percentage is really paying for
Equity buys you two things that cash does not.
The first is risk transfer. If you pay $40,000 for a build and it fails, you are out $40,000. If you pay $9,000 and 8%, you kept most of your runway and your partner ate the difference. That is the entire economic point, and it is why a low cash price should always come with an equity ask. A build partner offering both a low price and no equity is either inexperienced or planning to cut scope.
The second is duration. A vendor’s incentive ends at the final invoice. Someone holding equity that vests over the next year still has a reason to answer your message in month nine. Whether that matters depends on whether you need a product or a partner.
The benchmarks, side by side
| Arrangement | Typical equity | Cash | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical co-founder | 10% to 50% | Usually none | Permanent partner you cannot remove |
| Venture studio | 15% to 35% | Sometimes an additional fee | Build plus network, on their terms |
| Agency, cash only | 0% | Full rate, often $30k to $120k | A delivered product, then silence |
| Agency plus token equity | 0.5% to 2% | Near full rate | Mostly a discount, little alignment |
| Studio, cash and equity | 5% to 15% | Reduced monthly | Build plus a partner with a vesting stake |
Treat that table as orientation, not data. There is no published survey of what build partners charge in equity, so those ranges are assembled from public pricing pages and founder threads. The only row we can vouch for is the last one, because it is ours and it is published rather than quoted: $749 a month with 5% to 15% vesting, or $1,499 a month cash only. If another partner will not put their equivalent number in writing before a call, that is information too.
The one number that is real
There is no survey of build partners, but there is hard data on the adjacent deal, and it is worth holding the two side by side.
Carta, which administers the cap tables, reports that the median founding engineer grant is 1.54%, with a 25th-to-75th percentile range of 0.61% to 3.5%. It falls away fast: after two more hires the median is back down to 0.61%.
Sit that next to the 5% to 15% in the last row of the table. A build partner asking for that range is asking for roughly three to ten times what the median founding engineer receives — and the founding engineer shows up every day, indefinitely, and usually takes a salary cut to do it.
That comparison is not in our favour, which is exactly why it belongs here. It only holds up because of what is not changing hands. The founding engineer’s 1.54% sits on top of a salary; a build partner on 5% to 15% is taking a fraction of the cash rate and carrying the difference as risk. Remove that discount and the number stops being defensible immediately. If someone quotes you near full rate and a founder-sized stake, this is the arithmetic that says no.
How to size the grant
Three inputs, in order of weight.
How much cash is changing hands. This dominates everything else. Full rate in cash means token equity or none. Roughly half rate means the middle of the range. Near zero cash means you are recruiting a co-founder, not buying a build, and you should price it that way.
What stage you are at. A funded company with revenue and a clear spec is a far safer bet than an idea with a slide deck, so it commands the lower end. If you have users and money, do not pay idea-stage equity.
How big the build is. A four-week prototype and a nine-month platform are not the same risk. Size the stake against the work, then check it against the cash ratio above.
Structure matters more than the percentage
A 15% grant with clean vesting is safer for you than 6% granted outright. Vesting is the mechanism that makes underperformance survivable, and it is the thing founders most often skip.
The market standard is well documented. According to CRV’s guide to startup equity structure, “a four-year vesting schedule with a one-year cliff is the market standard for both founders and early employees,” with 25% vesting at the cliff and the rest monthly across the following three years. The same guide notes that issuing shares with no vesting at all is “often flagged as a dealbreaker” by institutional investors.
Our schedule is deliberately different, and it is worth saying why rather than pretending it is standard. We vest 5% to 15% monthly across twelve months with no cliff. Twelve months instead of four years because a build engagement is not a career. No cliff because a cliff protects the company against an early departure, and here the risk runs the other way: you want the ability to leave in month three without us keeping a year of equity. Cancel at month three and we have earned 3/12 of the agreed stake. You keep everything shipped.
That trade is real and it cuts both ways. A twelve-month schedule means a build partner is fully vested faster than a co-founder would be. If that bothers you, the cash-only track exists for exactly that reason.
What the agreement has to say
Percentage and vesting are the headline. These clauses are where deals actually go wrong.
- A named instrument. Advisor-style agreements or warrants in your existing entity, not a vague promise of shares. Your lawyer should recognise the document on sight.
- No board seat and no veto. A build partner has no business holding governance rights over your company.
- Buyback terms, written upfront. Decide now what happens if you want the stake back later. It is a cheap clause today and an expensive negotiation in two years.
- IP assignment on payment, not on completion. You should own what has been built even if the engagement ends early.
- The repository in your organisation from day one. If the code lives somewhere you cannot reach, the equity conversation is academic.
When you should just pay cash
Equity is the wrong instrument in three situations, and we will say so on a call rather than take the deal.
You are funded and the build is a known quantity. If you have raised and the spec is clear, cash is cheaper than dilution. A stake worth nothing today may cost you seven figures at Series B.
Your cap table is already crowded. If you have given away a lot early, adding another holder makes the next round harder. Investors read a messy cap table as a governance signal.
You want a supplier, not a partner. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. Pay the rate, own the outcome, and keep your equity.
If you are still weighing it, the cash and equity model page has the full terms, including the questions your lawyer will ask. And if the honest answer is that you should not be giving away equity at all, we would rather tell you that early than sign it.