Every founder asks the same question: “How much does it cost to build this?”
The honest answer is always “it depends,” but that’s a useless answer when you’re trying to budget, pitch investors, or decide whether to hire internally or hire a studio. So here’s the transparent breakdown we give every prospective client — the same framework we’ve used across 53 products.
The range: $40K–$200K. Here’s why.
A $40K engagement is typically a focused MVP: 4–6 weeks, single product, one platform, no legacy complexity. A $200K engagement is a full-scale platform build: 12–16 weeks, multiple integrations, complex architecture, production-grade infrastructure.
Most of our projects land between $60K–$120K. That covers a solid product with design, engineering, deployment, and documentation.
The variance comes from four factors: scope complexity, integration depth, team size, and timeline pressure.
What you’re actually paying for
Here’s what a typical $80K engagement includes — a SaaS product from zero to production in 8 weeks:
Week 0: Discovery & scoping ($5K–$8K value) We tear apart your brief. User interviews if you have users. Competitive audit. Technical feasibility check. Architecture proposal. The output is a blueprint both sides sign off on before a single line of code gets written.
This phase kills more bad ideas than any other. If we discover that your scope doesn’t match your budget, we tell you. If we discover the problem is different from what you described, we tell you that too.
Weeks 1–2: Architecture & design ($15K–$20K value) System design, data models, deployment strategy, CI/CD pipeline setup. In parallel, UX research, wireframes, and UI design for the core flows.
You see the design and architecture before we build. Changes here cost hours. Changes in week 6 cost weeks.
Weeks 3–6: Build ($35K–$45K value) This is where the money lives. A dedicated team — typically 2 engineers, 1 designer, 1 project lead — building in focused sprints. You see working software every Friday on a staging environment. Not a slide deck. Not a Figma prototype. Real, running software.
Every pull request is reviewed. Every deploy is automated. Every decision is documented.
Weeks 7–8: Polish, test, launch ($10K–$15K value) Performance optimization, security hardening, QA, user acceptance testing, production deployment, monitoring setup, documentation, and team handoff.
When we leave, you don’t inherit a codebase you can’t read. You inherit a system with documentation, test coverage, and a deployment pipeline your team can run.
What isn’t included in these numbers
Custom AI model training (adds $15K–$40K depending on complexity). Smart contract audits by third parties (we cover internal audits, but independent audits for DeFi protocols are separate). Ongoing hosting costs (AWS/GCP — we set it up, you pay the cloud bill). Content creation (copywriting, marketing assets).
Fixed quotes vs. hourly billing
We don’t do hourly billing. Ever.
Here’s why: hourly billing creates a perverse incentive. The slower the agency works, the more they earn. The more meetings they schedule, the higher the invoice. You end up paying for inefficiency.
Fixed quotes force us to be efficient. We scope aggressively, cut anything that doesn’t serve the core metric, and deliver on a timeline we committed to. If we underestimated the effort, that’s our problem, not yours.
You know the total cost before we start. No surprise invoices. No “we discovered additional complexity” emails in week 4.
How to evaluate whether a studio is worth the price
Ask these questions:
Do they show working software weekly, or just status updates? Do they give you a fixed quote or hourly estimate? Do they document what they build? Who owns the IP after payment? Can your team actually maintain the code they leave behind?
If the answer to any of these is unsatisfying, keep looking. The cheapest studio is never the cheapest option when you factor in the rewrite six months later.
A studio engagement isn’t cheap — but it’s dramatically cheaper than building the wrong thing with the wrong team and rewriting it six months later. Fixed quotes, weekly staging deploys, and 53 products of experience. That’s what $40K–$200K buys.