Pricing · 13 min
The first quote is rarely the full bill. Here's what we see teams forget - QA, store work, AI costs, and the rewrite that shows up after a 'cheap' v1.
Everyone wants one number. We get it. Budgets are real.
But the expensive part often shows up later: rebuilding auth, fixing payment edge cases, or an AI feature that looked fine in a demo and then hallucinated in front of a customer. We'd rather talk about that up front than pretend the day rate covers everything.
It's not one fuzzy 'build the app' line. Mix changes by platform - iOS, Android, web - and whether AI sits on the critical path. Roughly, though, a real budget has these pieces:
Bring a rough brief. We'll tell you what's in scope - and what isn't.
Ask for a scoped estimate →Scaffolding. Boilerplate. First UI passes. Drafting tests. With a senior person steering, that can shave real days off a sprint.
It doesn't delete judgment on security, data models, or weird partner APIs. If a vendor says AI cut the whole project in half with no trade-offs, ask what they quietly removed - QA, discovery, or someone on the hook after launch.
Account recovery. Admin tools ops will actually use. Config that non-engineers can change without a release. Model spend for AI features. App Store policy surprises.
And handover: docs, credentials, runbooks. If your 'prod' is still a founder's personal cloud account, that'll come due eventually.
Projects slow down when nobody is available to answer small but important questions: Can a user cancel after dispatch? Who approves a refund? What happens to an employee's records when they leave?
Those delays look like engineering cost on a timesheet, but the real problem is missing product ownership. Give one person authority to answer within a day. It is one of the cheapest ways to protect a delivery budget.
When a quote is too high, cutting quality is the wrong lever. Cut surface area. Ship one role, one market, or one complete transaction before adding dashboards and secondary workflows.
A narrow product with reliable payments and useful analytics can teach you something. A broad product with six unfinished journeys mostly teaches users not to return.
We'd rather scope a sharp MVP with clear out-of-scope lines than invent a fantasy fixed price for an unscoped dream. Change orders hurt everyone; honesty early is cheaper.
Sometimes that's a short PoC to kill unknowns. Sometimes a fixed MVP. Sometimes a monthly squad when priorities will move every week. We'll say which fits - including when you should keep DIY a bit longer.
If two quotes are far apart, ask each team to show assumptions rather than defending the total. One may include design, device testing, store submission, and post-launch support while the other ends when code reaches a test server.
Also ask who will actually do the work. A senior person in the sales call and a mostly junior delivery team is a very different offer from a senior-led squad, even when both proposals use the same job titles.
Next step
Send it over. We'll tell you what we'd keep, what we'd rewrite, and what can wait - without a 40-slide deck.
