What It Costs to Take an AI-Built Prototype to Production

The cost to take an AI-built prototype to production starts at $2,500 for a fixed-price System Spec that tells you whether to harden what you have or rebuild it, and production work itself starts at $10,000. Those are published prices: $2,500 for the spec, $2,500 for the requirements package, starting at $5,000 for a working MVP, as little as $10,000 to reach production, and as little as $1,500 a month afterward.

Most firms will not print those numbers. We do, on our process page, because what you need first is not a proposal. It is a number small enough that finding out costs less than guessing.

To get your own number rather than this article’s, book a free 30 minute scoping conversation. You leave it knowing which step you actually need, whether or not you buy it from us.

What each step costs and what you walk away with

Every step is a real stopping point: buy one, take the output, never speak to us again.

Work that does not fit a retainer has a published day rate: $1,200 per developer per day, half-day minimum, or $4,500 per week.

What the same job costs through other routes

What everyone else charges, from published sources. Where nobody publishes a number, it says so.

If you can describe four specific fixes in writing, a freelancer beats us on price. With a written specification and nine months of build ahead, an offshore team does. Almost nobody in this position can yet say which applies.

Why does an AI-built prototype cost more to finish than people expect?

Because the money already spent bought the part that is finished, and production is a different job. An AI tool optimizes for a demo: the happy path, one user, clean input. What makes software survive real people sits outside that target.

The pattern is consistent by the time these reach us, and it is a pattern rather than a judgment. The app was built to demo, not to hold. The data model was never designed, it accreted. Nobody who understands it end to end is still around. There is little or no test coverage, so every change risks breaking something.

The cost illusion follows from the speed. The demo took four days, so four more weeks feels like enough, but those four days bought the visible 80%, the cheap 80%. More on hardening a vibe-coded app.

What actually drives the number up?

Six things, and you can check all six tonight without a developer.

No access model. Anyone with the link sees everything. Rarely a small fix, because adding roles touches every query the app makes.

No tests. The cost is not writing tests. It is that every later change must be verified by hand against a system nobody understands.

Secrets in the code. Rotating keys is cheap. Finding out where they were already copied, and who holds a clone, is not.

No deploy path. Someone ships by hand from a laptop, or nobody has shipped since the builder left. Until a deploy is repeatable, every fix is a crisis.

No monitoring. If it fell over once and nobody can say why, it will happen again and nobody will know why then either.

A data model that does not fit the business. The expensive one. Every feature on top inherits a workaround that becomes the process.

What can you skip?

More than most people assume, and a good spec exists partly to say what to skip. Defer single sign-on and formal compliance until an enterprise buyer asks. Defer horizontal scaling until you have load. Defer the design system, the admin panel and most reporting.

What you cannot skip: an access model, secrets out of the repository, a repeatable deploy path, and a backup you have restored from. Those four are the difference between an outage and an incident you have to disclose.

When is a rebuild cheaper than hardening?

When the data model is wrong, because everything built on top has to be rewritten regardless of how good the code is. Hardening a sound structure is arithmetic. Hardening an unsound one means paying to keep something you will replace anyway.

The clearest case is multi-tenancy. An internal tool scopes every data model, query and workflow to one organization. Serving a second customer means data isolation, role-based access, per-tenant configuration and a clean onboarding path. When M1 Intel had an underperforming internal hotel CRM and other properties wanted it, the answer was a rebuild rather than a retrofit. We built Matrix, a multi-tenant hotel sales SaaS platform on Elixir, proved out with the first customer’s own sales team.

Four signals point toward rebuild: the data model does not match the business, nobody can explain the system end to end, the app cannot leave the tool it was built in, and each fix breaks two things. Three or more and you want an assessment, which is what codebase rescue is for.

What can a fixed price cover, and what can it not?

A fixed price covers work whose shape is known before it starts, which is why the first two steps are fixed at $2,500 each and the build steps are quoted from a floor. A System Spec has a defined output: a product brief, a build estimate, and a build or don’t-build call. That does not change with what we find, so we price it on day one.

Build work cannot be fixed on day one, because the driver is your system rather than our process, and we have not opened it. What we fix is the mechanism. An analyst puts a level of effort and a budget on each item and gets your confirmation first. No approval, no work. The budget stops itself: we work to the monthly number and tell you when we reach it. Every change gets three layers of testing and lands on staging for your approval.

What happens to the price if you stop after the spec?

You pay $2,500 and you keep the document. The System Spec is yours outright and you can take it to any team, including one that is not us. Once fees are paid you own the code we write for you, the repository and the infrastructure.

That is why the step works. A $2,500 spec turns three unscoped guesses into three comparable bids, and makes the cheaper routes above safer. On scoping a software project we publish the timeline too: 17 days from first call to a documented build or don’t-build answer.

The Seven-Gate Production Estimate

Every takeover we run passes seven production-readiness checks before we call it done. Score your own prototype in twenty minutes and you have a defensible number before you talk to anybody.

Score each gate 0 if it holds, 1 if it partly holds, 2 if it is missing.

1. Security and access. A real login, with roles enforced on the server?
2. Data integrity. Backups running, and has anyone restored from one?
3. Architecture. Does the data model match how the business works?
4. Test coverage. Can you change something and learn automatically if you broke it?
5. Observability. If it breaks at 2am, does somebody get told?
6. Deploy path. Can a new person ship safely on their first day?
7. Documented ownership. Is it written down who owns this and what it depends on?

Total out of 14, then apply the published rates: $1,200 per developer per day, or $4,500 per week.

The gate scores are yours and the rates are published. The effort bands are planning assumptions, an order of magnitude, not a quote.

In the second row, the two gates scoring 2 on security and data turn a manageable project into a three-month one.

Key Takeaways

• It costs $2,500 to find out, from $10,000 to reach production. Everything before the build is fixed price.
• Every step is a stopping point. Once fees are paid you own the code we write for you, and the spec goes to any team.
• Six things drive the number: no access model, no tests, secrets in the code, no deploy path, no monitoring, and a data model that does not fit.
• Cheaper routes genuinely win: a freelancer on a defined single job, an offshore team on sustained volume against a written spec.
• A rebuild beats hardening when the structure is wrong, most often when a single-tenant tool must serve a second customer.
• Score your own system on the seven gates first, then apply the published rates.

Key Terms Glossary

Access model. The rules about who can see and do what. Without one, anybody with the link has everything.

Secrets. Passwords, API keys and tokens the app needs to run, which belong in a managed store, not in the code.

Deploy path. The repeatable process for getting a change live. If only one person can do it, you have a person, not a process.

Staging. A private copy of the live system where you review changes before real users see them.

Test coverage. How much is checked automatically when something changes. Low coverage slows every change after the first.

Data model. How the software represents your business: what a customer is, what an order is, how they relate.

Multi-tenancy. Serving several customers from one system without any seeing each other’s data. A foundation, not a feature.

System Spec. A fixed-price, time-boxed document covering goals, flows, technical direction and success criteria, plus a build estimate and a build or don’t-build call.

Floor price. A published starting number, as in “from $10,000,” used where the real driver is your system rather than our process.

FAQ

What does it cost to take an AI-built prototype to production?

The assessment is $2,500 as a fixed-price System Spec, and production work starts at $10,000 depending on complexity. If a working MVP has to be built first, that step starts at $5,000. Support after launch is as little as $1,500 a month.

Do I own the code?

Yes. Once fees are paid you own the code we write for you, the repository and the infrastructure. That includes the System Spec product brief and requirements document, which are yours whether or not you go ahead with a build.

Is it cheaper to rebuild than to harden?

Sometimes, and the deciding factor is almost always the data model. If the structure does not match how your business works, every feature on top inherits a workaround, so hardening means paying to keep something you will replace anyway. The most common case is a single-tenant internal tool that now has to serve outside customers.

Does it matter which AI tool built the prototype?

Less than people think. Whether it came from an AI tool, a freelancer, or an agency that stalled, the evaluation is identical: can the existing system carry production load, and how much of it is worth keeping. We make no assumptions about who or what wrote the first version.

What does ongoing support cost after launch?

As little as $1,500 a month, flat, with no setup fees. That covers feature work, support, hosting, unlimited bug fixes through our automated systems, a staging site, and bi-weekly project management, with every pull request reviewed by a lead developer. Retainers run month to month with thirty days notice to stop.

Is this cheaper than hiring a developer?

For one prototype, almost always. The median annual wage for software developers was $135,980 in May 2025, and benefits add roughly another third, so one hire is close to $198,500 a year loaded. A hire makes sense when software is the business, not when one system needs to reach production.

Ready to put a number on yours?

Score your prototype against the seven gates, then bring the result to a free consultation for a straight answer on harden versus rebuild.

Book a scoping conversation with Paul Byrne

Related: Prototype to Production | Hardening a Vibe-Coded App | Scope a Software Project | Codebase Rescue | Our Process

Paul Byrne is President of Razoyo, a software engineering firm in The Colony, Texas, serving clients across the United States since 2011. Razoyo takes prototypes and constrained systems into production. Its work includes Spider, the platform behind Lighthouse’s hotel business intelligence, ranked #1 of 74 for Business Intelligence at the 2025 HotelTechAwards; AutomaticFFL, Razoyo’s own firearms-compliance checkout product; and Matrix, a hotel event-sales CRM rebuilt into multi-tenant SaaS for M1 Intel.