Ask ten agencies and you will hear $40,000 to $300,000, over three to twelve months. That range was honest three years ago. Today it mostly measures how long a team takes, not how hard the problem is.
Most of a six-figure quote was never the difficult part. It was people-time: project setup, screen after screen, wiring the same plumbing every product needs, writing the tests, then three rounds of revisions across a team that has to meet about it first.
That work collapsed. A senior engineer working AI-first does in a day what used to fill a fortnight, because the machine writes the obvious code and the engineer decides what obvious means. The bill was mostly hours, so when the hours fall by an order of magnitude, so does the price.
This only holds if the person driving already knows how to build. Hand the same tools to someone who cannot tell a good architecture from a bad one and you get software that demos well and collapses on contact with real users. That is the whole story of vibe-coding platforms.
The hard parts are still hard, and they are all decisions rather than typing. How you fan out a feed. Whether a seat hold is atomic. Where the ledger lives. How two offline edits merge. Which of those you get wrong determines whether you rewrite the product in a year.
No model makes that judgment for you today. It is the reason this is $5,000 rather than free, and the reason we would rather talk about your build for twenty minutes than sell you a template.
A launchable core of a genuinely complex product: one week, $5,000. Designed from scratch, real backend, deployed on your own accounts, all the code yours. We cover the AI and token costs.
The finished public product is a different number, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. What we are precise about is where the line sits, which is why every page below lists what we would leave out as clearly as what we build.
Typical studio quote, against a one-week core:
Because most of an agency quote was people-time on work that is now fast: scaffolding, screens, wiring, and revision rounds. That work collapsed. The judgment calls did not, which is why this is cheaper but not free.
The core is. It is deployed, monitored and takes real users. What it is not is the finished public product with ten years of features. We name the ceiling before you pay anything.
The whole of a mature product. Machine-learning ranking, fraud systems, compliance workflows and multi-region scale are real work and we scope them separately instead of pretending they fit in a week.
Because they still price by headcount and hours. If your build genuinely takes a small team a couple of months, $50,000 is honest arithmetic. The question is whether it needs to take that long.
A free 20 minute call. We will tell you if it fits in a week, and what it takes if it does not.
Or see how the week works.