What does it cost to build software?

Nobody can honestly quote a product from a conversation. What we can do is price the part that produces the quote, so you never pay for a build we both guessed at.

Discovery is bought separately, on purpose. It ends with a written scope, a prototype you can click through, a technical plan and one fixed price to build it — all of it yours to keep, and buildable by any competent team if you decide it shouldn’t be us. That’s the point: you find out what version one costs without having already committed to us building it. Half of what you pay for discovery comes off the build if you go ahead with us, so choosing us afterward costs you $2,250 less than it looks like on this page.

“From” means the floor, not a teaser. It’s where a project of that shape starts, and discovery is where it gets an exact number. Nobody gets quoted more than the figure on this page without knowing why before they say yes.

One build at a time. This is a founder-led studio and the founder is on every project, which is the reason the work is good and the reason there’s a queue. When the slot is taken, this page says so and gives you the next opening.

A first version is a finished thing. It runs, people sign up, cards get charged, the work that used to happen by hand happens by itself. You own the code and every account it runs on. For a lot of businesses that is the entire purchase, and the right move afterward is to go back to work and let it earn.

Now the part nobody says out loud before they take your money.

Software is never finished the way a printed card is finished. Browsers change, the payment processor changes its rules, a dependency gets a security patch, and your own customers ask for the fourth thing you didn’t think of. A product left completely alone doesn’t stay still; it slowly stops working. That is what running code does, and it’s the reason the section below exists.

What it also won’t do is find you customers. A product doesn’t sell itself because it exists; the launch surface further down — the marketing site, the pricing page, the emails — is separate work and gets its own number. Plenty of founders already have that covered. We’ll say so on the call, before you’ve paid us anything.

Nobody decides to let a product rot. It happens in the six weeks after launch, while you’re busy selling it. A dependency needs a security patch. Stripe changes something. A customer finds the one screen that breaks on an old phone, doesn’t tell you, and quietly stops paying.

The monthly plans are that, handled. Hosting sits inside every tier — no separate bill, nobody emailing you about a renewal you don’t understand — and when something breaks the person who answers is the person who built it.

Month to month. No twelve-month minimum, no cancellation fee. If a month goes by where we didn’t earn it, you leave at the end of it.

Leaving doesn’t cost you the work you already paid for. The repository, the cloud account, the domain and the payment processor were created in your name on day one — signoff transfers what’s left, usually inside 24 to 48 hours. Cancel the monthly plan later and there is nothing to ask us for; the product keeps running wherever you decide to put it.

Not in any monthly tier: a rebuild or redesign · a second product · migrating to a different stack · features large enough to need their own scope · the paid infrastructure and third-party bills themselves. Each of those is its own quoted work, and being specific about it is what keeps this price real instead of a number that quietly turns into a smaller service.

The launch surface is quoted per product

The marketing site, the pricing page, the sign-up funnel, the lifecycle emails and the search and analytics wiring underneath them: we build all of it, and none of it gets a number on this page. The scope moves too much for one figure to be true — five pages or twenty, one language or two, an existing brand or nothing at all.

We’d rather say that than publish a floor we’d walk back on the call. And we won’t quote it cheap to win the work: priced under what the production actually costs, it gets delivered thin, and you’d find out in month three. Bring us what you’re picturing and you’ll have a fixed number before anything starts.

1. You book the scoping call. Thirty minutes, free. You describe the problem; we tell you honestly what it would take, and whether software is even the answer. Sometimes it’s a tool you can buy for $30 a month, and we say that instead of quoting you.
2. You keep the plan. Written up, yours, whether or not you hire us. Take it to another developer if you’d rather. It works there too.
3. Discovery, if the thing is worth building. One to two weeks, its own price, paid on its own. It ends with a scope, a prototype you can click through, a technical plan and a fixed price for the build. Every one of those is yours to keep and buildable by anyone.
4. You approve the build number before anything is written. One figure, covering exactly what discovery defined. It doesn’t move unless you ask for something outside it, and then you see the new number first.
5. We build it in sprints. Each one ends with something you can open and click, so you’re never waiting months to see whether we understood you. The person you talked to at step one is the person doing the work.
6. It launches, and you decide about monthly. Separately, afterward, once you’ve seen how we work. The build never requires a plan — you already own the code and the accounts it runs on.