A free consultation is a weird business model. We do it anyway.

We get asked this a lot: if the first conversation is free, what stops people from picking our brains and disappearing?

Short answer: nothing. And that's the point.

The pitch meeting nobody likes

If you've ever had an app idea, you've probably had this experience. You describe it to a developer or an agency, and somewhere in the first hour the conversation turns into a sales call. You learn more about their process than about your product, and the meeting ends with a vague quote and a feeling you've been pitched to.

We don't want to be that meeting. So we flipped the incentives: the first conversation costs you nothing, and our job in it is to give you an honest take on scope, timeline, and budget — even when the honest take is "you don't need to hire anyone for this yet."

That feels risky. It isn't, really. When we tell a founder the truth about their idea early, they remember it — even when it costs us the project.

What you actually get

If you come to us with an idea, here's the path, and what each step costs:

1. Free consultation. A call or an email thread. You describe the idea; we ask the annoying questions — who uses it, what breaks without it, what does "done" mean. You leave with a realistic sense of size and cost.
2. Free concept mockup. With the consultation, we sketch the app as a few screens. Not a design system — a picture of the thing you're describing, so the rest of the conversation happens about something concrete.
3. A full PRD from RM 150. If you decide you want the spec, you get a complete product requirements document: functional requirements, non-functional requirements, error handling, and a test plan you can use to sign off on the work. PDF or Markdown. Yours to keep — ours or any AI agent's to build with.

The PRD step is the one people find strange. Writing a real spec takes us time, so why price it at the cost of a nice dinner? Because the spec is where we demonstrate what we actually do. Anyone can promise quality; a document that lists every failure mode and how it's handled is quality, in writing.

Try the ladder — tap each step to see what you'd get:

Why the free tier is honest, not bait

Here's what we're betting on: a founder who gets real value before paying anything — a straight answer, a usable mockup, a spec that's correct — does not need to be sold later. They compare us to everyone who gated that conversation behind an invoice.

And when a free consult ends with "you don't need us yet," that's a good outcome too. The right project, at the right time, is how we keep work we believe in. Builders can smell when a studio is excited about the wrong thing; we'd rather be the studio that says no early.

Start where it's free

The start-a-project form takes two minutes. Tell us the idea — the free consultation and the mockup come with it, and the PRD is there when you want the document in hand.

Or if you'd rather learn to build it yourself — that's what the academy is for, and we teach the same fundamentals we ship with.