Straight answers about what this costs.
We do not publish a rate card, because pricing a product nobody has scoped yet would be a guess dressed up as a number. What we can do is show you exactly how pricing works here, what moves the number, and how we keep money boring for the whole engagement.
Every engagement starts with a written number: a fixed price for a fixed scope, or a clearly bounded monthly investment for an ongoing team. You see it before any work starts, and you never discover the price as you go. Surprises in an invoice are a failure we take personally.
The honest reason there is no price list: two products that sound identical in one sentence can be months apart in engineering. A booking app for a clinic and a booking app for a hospital network share a sentence, not a budget. A public range wide enough to be true would be too wide to be useful.
What we promise instead is speed to a real number. One call about your objective and constraints, and a written proposal follows with the scope, the timeline, and the investment in plain language. If budget is the constraint, say so on the call. We would rather cut scope honestly than pad an estimate quietly.
Scope drives cost more than anything else, and the levers sit on your side of the table. Fewer kinds of users, fewer day-one integrations, a first version that proves the idea instead of finishing the vision: each of these makes the number smaller without making the product worse. What makes builds expensive is rarely ambition. It is vagueness, because a team that cannot see the edges of the work has to price the fog, and every vendor prices fog with padding.
How the money is shaped.
Four engagement shapes, each with its own way of handling money. All of them start with a number in writing.
What actually drives the cost.
Six things move the number more than anything else. Knowing them helps you shape the scope before we ever talk.
Scope and complexity
The biggest lever, and the one you control. One kind of user with one core journey is the cheap end. Every added audience and day-one workflow brings its own screens, permissions, and edge cases, and moves the number up.
Integrations
Every external system the product must talk to adds real work. Modern, documented APIs sit at the cheap end. Old, undocumented, or approval-gated systems sit at the expensive one, and each can be deferred if a manual step will do for now.
AI scope and evaluation
A model call is cheap. Dependable AI is not: grounding in your data, evaluation so quality is a measured number, and guardrails for when the model is wrong. The more the product rides on the AI being right, the more of this it needs.
Compliance and data sensitivity
Health records, money movement, and data about minors raise the bar for security, audit trails, and careful data paths. The rules do not bend, so the effort has to. Flagging this early is much cheaper than retrofitting it.
Timeline compression
A deadline that needs a bigger team raises the price faster than it moves the date. Sometimes that trade is worth it. Often resequencing the scope gets you the date without the premium, and we will tell you which applies.
Life after launch
Who owns the product in month two: your team, ours, or a mix. Support and iteration are a choice you make in the open before work starts, never a fee that appears on an invoice later.
What the first call gets you.
One conversation, no charge, and you leave with more than a pitch. This is the standing deal, whether or not you hire us.
- A straight read on whether you need a team like ours at all. Sometimes the honest answer is a freelancer or an off-the-shelf tool, and we say so.
- A first pass at scope: what belongs in version one, what can wait, and what a human can do by hand for the first few months.
- The risks we can see from experience: the integration that will hurt, the compliance that changes the build, the assumption carrying the most weight.
- A scoped estimate in writing within days: what we would build, how long it takes, and a real number, fixed for fixed scope.
- A proposal built to be compared. Send the same brief to other teams and hold every number against the same scope. We will tell you what to look for.
What you can hold us to.
The rules that keep money boring from the first call to the last invoice.
- A written number before any work starts, fixed scope or bounded monthly.
- The number we agree is the number you pay for the scope we agreed.
- Changes are priced and approved before they are built, never after.
- Weekly progress you can hold against the budget at any point.
- You own the code, the accounts, and the documentation from day one.
- No lock-in. Walking away is always cheap, which is why partners stay.
Money questions, answered straight.
Why do you not publish prices?+
The honest answer has two halves. The first is accuracy: two products that sound identical in one sentence can be months apart in engineering, so a published range wide enough to be true would be too wide to be useful, and a narrow one would quietly mislead you. The second half is self-interest, and we will own it: we would rather be judged on a written proposal than on a rate card, because a proposal with a scope and a number is something you can hold us to. You get that number after one call, and getting it costs nothing.
Do you charge hourly or fixed?+
Fixed for fixed scope, a bounded monthly investment for an ongoing team. We do not run open-ended hourly meters, because they reward slowness and make budgeting impossible for you.
When do I actually get a number?+
After the first call. We take your objective and constraints away, shape the scope, and come back with a written proposal: what we will build, how long it takes, and what it costs. If the scope is genuinely unclear, we will propose a small paid discovery first and say exactly what it answers.
What if my budget is smaller than my idea?+
Tell us the budget. The honest move is usually to cut scope to the slice that proves the idea with real users, launch that well, and let the results fund the rest. We would rather build a small thing that works than a big thing that almost does.
How is payment usually structured?+
Fixed-scope work is split across milestones, each ending in working software you can see and use, so you always know what the next payment buys and you can stop if we ever stop earning it. Retainers are a bounded monthly amount agreed in advance. We never ask for the full amount upfront, and we do not think you should ever pay one.
What makes a build cheaper without making it worse?+
Cut scope, not quality. One kind of user instead of three, a first version that proves the idea instead of finishing the vision, manual steps behind the scenes where a human is cheaper than a feature, and boring technology nobody has to debug at three in the morning. What never works is buying the same scope from a cheaper, more junior team: the failed first build is the most expensive item in this industry, because you pay for the product twice.
What do you need from us to quote accurately?+
One page: what the product does, who uses it, the systems it must talk to, and the hard constraints, deadline, budget, compliance. That is enough for a useful first call and a written proposal after it. If the scope is genuinely foggy even to you, we will say so and propose a small paid discovery with a defined output instead of pricing the fog.
Want a real number?
Bring the objective, the constraints, and the budget if you have one. One call, and a written proposal follows in plain language.