Most agencies will not answer this until you have had two calls. We publish our whole rate card, so here is the honest version, including the parts that are usually left out of the quote.
The short answer
A single working feature in front of real users costs $15,000 to $22,000 and takes four to six weeks. A complete product that can take payments and be run as a business costs $32,000 to $48,000 over eight to twelve weeks. Something other businesses can license from you — one engine serving several separate customers — costs $65,000 to $110,000 over fourteen to twenty weeks.
If those numbers are far from what you expected, the gap is usually one of two things: you are picturing a prototype rather than a product, or you have been quoted for a prototype and told it was a product.
What actually moves the price
- Accounts and permissions. One shared login is cheap. Different people seeing different things is not, because it has to be enforced where the data lives rather than in the screens.
- Taking money. Subscriptions, upgrades, failed payments, refunds and an admin view you can actually run a business from — this is routinely underestimated.
- Whether other companies use it. Serving several separate customers from one system is a different architecture, decided on day one. Retrofitting it later is a rebuild.
- How much of it is genuinely AI. A well-scoped AI layer on a solid product is a small part of the cost. AI stirred through everything is expensive and usually worse.
The costs that arrive after launch
Software is not a thing you buy once. Certificates expire, dependencies need patching as security holes are found, backups need testing, and AI providers change their pricing and their models underneath you. Our care plans run from $195 a month for a website to $495 a month for a product with a database, payments and monitoring behind it.
Add your own running costs on top: hosting, the database, email delivery, and whatever the AI itself consumes. For most small products that is tens of dollars a month, not thousands — but it is never zero, and a quote that does not mention it is not a complete quote.
What a fixed price should include
Ours are fixed scope and fixed price, with no hourly billing. That is only meaningful if the scope is written down properly first, which is why almost every engagement starts with a two-week Readiness Sprint at $6,500 to $9,500. You leave that with a written roadmap and a straight go or no-go — and it is deliberately standalone, so you can take the roadmap to somebody else.
If something is already half-built
A no-code tool, an AI builder, or a developer who moved on — a rescue starts with a fixed-fee $2,500 assessment that tells you what is salvageable, what has to be rebuilt and what it will cost. That fee comes off the work if you go ahead.
The question worth asking any quote
Ask who can see whose data, and where that is enforced. If the answer is anywhere in the browser, the price is not the problem. We have never been called in to rescue an application where that was done properly.
Every price band, with what each one includes and how long it takes.
See the full rate card