Have an AI idea?
Describe your project and we'll deliver a complete build plan and cost & timeline estimate you can take to any developer. Free.
AI made software 10× cheaper to build.
And 100× more dangerous to deploy.
Vibe-coded apps demo great and fall apart in production — leaking data, exposing keys, and putting your reputation on the line. Real scoping means thinking through every layer: architecture, auth, data, integrations, compliance, monitoring, and security.
Vertical-specific, not vague
Healthcare gets EHR integration windows. Manufacturing gets OT/IT segmentation. Fintech gets reg scope. Built from 28 years of shipping in these verticals.
Real offers, not surveys
Rates from our Global Developer Salaries Guide — primary offer data across 40+ countries. Geography alone can swing cost by $500K–$2M.
What this excludes
We deliberately exclude infrastructure, third-party licenses, and legal fees. Bundling them inflates the number and hides the build cost you actually care about.
See your software cost estimate in under 3 minutes
A defensible second opinion, on demand
Agencies quote custom builds for problems already solved — five-figure invoices for things a $20/month tool does better. This estimator levels the field.
Second opinion in your pocket
Walk into any developer or agency conversation with a defensible build plan, realistic timeline, and a cost range grounded in real projects. No more “trust me, it's complicated” pricing.
The right tool beats custom code
Auth, payments, search, analytics, queues, vector stores — there's a battle-tested platform for almost every layer of your stack. We recommend the ones that cut months off your build.
Real money, not theoretical
The right stack choice on day one routinely saves six figures over the life of a project. Recommendations come from engineers who've lived through the migrations, the rewrites, and the bills.
Every variable we model — beyond generic cost calculations
The estimate isn't a markup on a base price. It's a bottoms-up cost model: scope drives a tier, the tier drives team composition, and geography, phase distribution, and risk all compound into the final range.
Weighted complexity scoring
Every answer carries a weighted score. The cumulative total maps to one of four tiers — MVP, Medium, Complex, Enterprise — each with its own duration band and team shape.
FTE × hours × blended rate
Cost is built role-by-role: each tier specifies FTE counts per role (PM, Eng, ML, Design, QA, DevOps), multiplied by 160 hours/month across the project's mid-point duration.
Primary salary data, not surveys
Rates are adjusted by a geographic multiplier sourced from JetBridge's Global Developer Salaries Guide — primary offer data across 40+ countries. One answer can swing cost by $500K–$2M.
Discovery → Build → Harden → Launch
Total cost is distributed across four phases at fixed percentages calibrated from shipped projects. This makes burn-rate planning and milestone budgets legible from day one.
Low / Mid / High confidence band
We publish a range, not a single number. Mid is the modeled estimate; Low (×0.72) reflects favorable scope and reuse; High (×1.38) reflects realistic discovery, rework, and integration friction.
Calibrated by answer depth
Confidence starts at 40% and climbs as you provide richer descriptions, data context, geography, and vertical-specific answers. The number you see is honest about what we know.
We've shipped the backend
Every number is sanity-checked against systems we've actually built — event pipelines, vector stores, multi-tenant auth, model-serving infra. We know what a queue costs at 10M events/day because we've run it.
Blended teams, modeled honestly
We staff across the US, LatAm, EU, and Eastern Europe every day. The estimator reflects real blended-team economics — onshore leads paired with high-trust offshore engineers — not a fantasy lowest-cost-region quote.
What AI compresses, and what it doesn't
Scaffolding, CRUD, internal tools, and first-draft UIs are meaningfully faster with AI in the loop. Distributed systems, security review, and domain modeling still need senior humans — and our estimate reflects exactly where each lever applies.
Built by software engineers who have shipped code for nearly three decades
Built by engineers who staff onshore + offshore teams every week and know exactly which features AI accelerates. Answer some thoughtful questions and walk away with a defensible cost model you can take into your next budget conversation.