PRICING

Every price, one place.

Prototype

Prove the core interaction works before you build it.

Starting at $4,000

Includes the repository, a one-command local setup, and the mechanic verified live with you.

What the floor includes

  • The core mechanic, built for real and running, not simulated or faked for a demo.
  • A written diagnosis naming the single riskiest unproven assumption in your idea, delivered before a line of code gets written.
  • A repository you own, with one command that brings up the app and its database on a machine you control.
  • Rounds of tuning on how the mechanic actually behaves: timing, edge cases, feel.
  • An honest account of what carries forward into a real product and what was always going to be thrown away.
  • Any third-party usage costs estimated and capped up front, billed to you at cost.
  • The mechanic verified live, together, with you watching it run in a browser.

At this price it is deliberately plain: black and white, default styling, no design pass. Everything the mechanic needs to work is there. Everything it needs to look finished is not, and that's a choice you get to make separately rather than one we make for you.

Where it lives, once it's proven

Every engagement gets proven, watched live, together. That's never a separate line item, and it's never something you pay extra for, whether the mechanic ran entirely on your laptop or needed a real server just to exist at all. Whatever it took to reach that point is already folded into the level price above. Proven isn't a choice you make. It's the floor every single build already stands on, no matter which level it's in.

What you're actually choosing, past that floor, is whether anyone besides your own team ever gets to reach it, and if so, who.

StateWhat it meansPrice
ShareableDeployed at a real link. No accounts, no sign-in, no data collected. Someone just clicks and tries it. Stays live 90 days.+$1,0002,000
Unsupervised strangersEverything Shareable already is, plus: real strangers, alone, nobody from either team watching. Needs light sign-in, usage limits, sessions that expire cleanly.+$2,0004,000

How it looks

Whether this matters is entirely your call, not a rule about who's going to see it. Plain works fine even in front of someone else, if that's genuinely how you want to show it. If you'd rather it feel a little more considered before anyone sees it, whatever your reason, that's what Presentable buys.

StateWhat it meansPrice
Plain by defaultBlack and white, default spacing, nothing decorative. The mechanic is the point.Included
PresentableA pre-packaged theme, built on Tailwind and styled shadcn components, applied as-is. No design round, no revision loop.+$8001,600

Custom design and visual revision are their own conversation, not something this tier covers.

How complex the mechanic is

Two different kinds of things push this number up, and every example from here on names exactly which ones apply to it. Nothing below is priced by vibe. It's priced by which of these are actually true for that specific idea.

Infrastructure the mechanic can't run without:

  • Needs an always-on database: Something has to remember state between visits, not just show a snapshot.
  • Needs real user identity: The system has to know which of two or more people is doing what, not just sit behind one shared password.
  • Needs a live, always-open connection: The screen has to update the instant something happens somewhere else, not just when it's refreshed.
  • Needs a server standing between your app and an outside service: Something has to hold a key or a credential safely and make the call on your app's behalf.
  • Needs to run on its own schedule, whether or not you're there: Something has to wake up and do its job automatically, at six in the morning or once an hour, independent of you ever opening the app.

How complex the logic itself is, independent of any of that:

  • The logic itself is genuinely hard to get right: Real math, real constraints, real edge cases, even if nothing outside the mechanic ever needs to know about it.
  • The AI is making a real judgment call: Deciding something, not just displaying, sorting, or transcribing.
  • More than one kind of input has to work together: Voice, image, video, or text, combined, not handled one at a time.
  • Something has to generate in real time to match something live: Video syncing to speech as it's being spoken, for instance, not something pre-made.
  • Generated output has to match something real: A real photo, a real space, a real object, not just something plausible-looking made from scratch.
  1. Level One, alone on your machine$4,0006,000

    The real line isn't whether a server or a database exists anywhere. It's whether we have to stand one up and host it ourselves. If whatever you're connecting to already runs its own backend, its own database, even its own AI, that's fine, that's theirs to run, not ours. What actually pushes something out of this level is whether anything has to be reachable from outside your own machine: a public link, a callback some outside service needs to reach back into, a process that has to stay running and answering requests whether anyone's watching or not. A one-shot call out to someone else's service and back, even a paid one, doesn't need any of that.

    One thing that looks like Level One and isn't: anything touching a real bank account. Read the transactions, sort them, show where the money went, sounds simple. In practice it needs something reachable from outside your machine to handle the login handoff safely, which jumps it out of this level entirely, regardless of how simple the logic looks.

  2. Level Two, the state can't live on just one machine, one sitting$6,0008,000

    Three different things push a mechanic out of Level One and into needing a real server behind it. One is the pattern already covered: more than one person has to see the exact same live state change at the same moment. A second, just as common, doesn't involve anyone else at all. One person's own data has to survive past a single sitting and follow them from device to device, their phone in the morning, their laptop that night, and it has to stay provably theirs and nobody else's. A third: the mechanic has to run on its own, on a schedule, whether or not anyone's machine is even on. None of the three is about how hard the logic is. All three mean the same underlying thing: the state, or the process itself, can't live only on whichever machine you happen to be using right now.

    An always-on database and real identity behind it are the actual floor of this level, present in every example here. A live, instant connection is an additional piece on top of that floor, needed only when someone, or your own devices, has to see a change the moment it happens rather than the next time something loads.

  3. Level Three, real judgment, real integration, on the same foundation$8,00012,000

    Everything here still needs the server and real identity from the level below. What separates the examples is which of the harder difficulty tags stack on top, and how many.

Past that, scoped with you

The complexity here can't be priced from the outside, because it depends on specifics nobody can answer without a real conversation first.

Two tags you won't see priced anywhere on this page, and why. Needs a vector database and AI executes a real financial transaction on its own both get redirected instead of quoted, no matter how they're framed. The first is a specialized discipline of its own, evaluating and tuning retrieval quality, closer to a research loop than a build task. The second means real money moving with nobody confirming first. Either one comes up, and we say so plainly in the first free conversation, before discovery ever starts.

If you could search "how to integrate X" and be done, that's plumbing, not a prototype. It's a prototype when nobody can tell you in advance whether the interaction will actually work, or feel right.

How the choices stack

  • Level One floor, still just proven, plain: $4,000. Nothing added, because proven never costs extra.
  • Level One floor, made shareable: $4,000 + $1,000–2,000 = $5,000–6,000
  • Level Two floor (exercise tracker), still just proven, plain: $6,000. Already above the Level One ceiling, because the database and real identity behind it were never optional here, not because anything got added on top.
  • Level Two ceiling (table board), made shareable and presentable: $7,750 + $1,000–2,000 + $800–1,600 = $9,550–11,350
  • Level Three top (voice and avatar), unsupervised strangers, presentable: $11,500 + $2,000–4,000 + $800–1,600 = $14,300–17,100

When the 90 days are up

Shareable hosting runs 90 days from delivery, and we'll reach out well before it lapses so nothing goes dark in the middle of a conversation. From there you take the repository with you and run it yourself, or it's time for the MVP conversation. We're not in the business of maintaining this for you, and if you want someone who is, we'll point you at them rather than quietly become them.

Discovery

Real diagnostic work, paid, not a sales call wearing a different hat. Ends in a short written document: the problem stated plainly, what's in and out of scope, a sketch of how it'd be built, the biggest risks, priced options with a plain-English recommendation.

LevelStandaloneCredited if we keep going
Level One$1,000$500
Level Two$1,500$750
Level Three$2,000$1,000
Scoped with you$2,500 and upnot yet determined

Beyond this tier

Moving up to an MVP
Real strangers, real accounts, data collected off the back of it, a system built to run unsupervised. That's a different project with a different shape, not a bigger version of this one.
Design authored for you
Applying a ready-made theme is part of this tier. Designing something original — your own type, your own layout, rounds of visual revision — is real design work with a real designer's time behind it, and it gets scoped separately.
Work we'd send you elsewhere for
Building the engine underneath rather than composing what exists. Training a model from scratch. Native mobile using device APIs. Advanced 3D or motion production. Systems needing very high concurrent load on day one. And anywhere we'd have to own and certify the compliance ourselves rather than compose tools that already carry it.