When a client told us an agency had quoted 5 months and around $30,000 for their platform, the price wasn't what surprised us. The timeline was. Five months for a portal with roles, stages, and a comparison engine isn't a complexity problem — it's an overhead problem.
We built it in 12 days. It's in production, it's used every day, and the code belongs to the client. This isn't a marketing promise — it's a case you can open and inspect. The interesting part isn't the number; it's what we had to stop doing to get there.
What we did NOT do
Most of the time in a traditional project doesn't go into writing code. It goes into everything that surrounds the code:
- Three-week "discovery" phases that end in a PDF.
- Review rounds where every change passes through one project manager who hands it to another.
- Status meetings to report that work is happening, instead of doing the work.
- Sign-off chains on mockups nobody will ever use.
None of that builds product. We cut it. Not because we're careless, but because every layer of middlemen you remove is time that goes back into the real product.
The method, in short
Decide fast, build on proven foundations, and show something working every single day.
Three decisions do almost all the work:
1. A stack the team already knows cold
We don't experiment with new technology on a client's project. We use a stack we know by heart: Supabase (database, auth, storage, and row-level security), Netlify for the frontend and continuous deployment, and React for the interface. Payments through Stripe, or a local processor when the project calls for it.
When you don't have to learn your tools while you build, speed stops being a miracle and becomes the default.
2. Production from day one
There's no "staging environment" you have to migrate later. Every commit deploys. The client sees the real product, at its real URL, from day one — not a presentation of how it *would* look. That collapses the feedback loop from weeks to hours.
3. Honest scope
In the diagnostic we define the target metric and what goes into the first version. We don't promise "everything" — we promise what moves the needle, in production, and we leave the rest for later iterations. A platform that works today is worth more than a perfect one that lands in five months.
Always 12 days?
No. A landing page ships in days; a corporate site in 3 to 5 weeks; a mobile app in 4 to 8 weeks; a full platform in 4 to 10 weeks. Twelve days was one case: a platform with well-defined scope and fast decisions on the client's side. When the client takes longer to decide, the project takes longer — and that's fair.
What is constant: we deliver in weeks, not months, and if we slip for reasons on our end, we take it off the final cost.
What you walk away with
Speed doesn't mean fragility. It means focus. If you're deciding who to hire, don't just ask "how much does it cost?" — ask "how much of that time and that price is product, and how much is overhead?" That one question alone saves you months.
Working out of Mexico City on US Central time, our rates land roughly 50% under a comparable US shop — same deliverable, half the burn. A custom platform or MVP starts at $24,000; a website at $9,000.
Got a project stuck in five-month quotes? Tell us what you need and we'll tell you, honestly, how long it would actually take.