Agreed. This is definitely true, unless your product is so trivial that it can be done in a few days, it will take some investment from them. As far as prototy

Agreed. This is definitely true, unless your product is so trivial that it can be done in a few days, it will take some investment from them. As far as prototyping, well not sure exactly what is meant by this as it could mean hiring a designer who knows some javascript to hack together some pages that act and feel like a real app but that is just a hollow shell. In this case, sure you can get this done somewhat cheaply but it can only then be a bridge to getting funding as its still going to take an investment to build the actual application.