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The estimator moved from a teaser into a real scoping tool. It now teaches the buyer which decisions move the price and where the budget is actually going.
At a glance
Published: May 5, 2026
Category: Product
Reading time: 2 min read
Written for: Non-technical buyers who want budget clarity before they commit to a discovery call.
Author: Christian Rickert · Founder, AI Engineering
Search intent
The estimator now shows named cost components, plain-language prompts, and an explicit AI acceleration discount instead of hiding everything inside one vague range.
The article body is now sourced from repo-managed MDX with explicit metadata for tags, author, reading time, and related reading.
If this page was useful, these are the next two entries that usually make sense to read before opening the estimator.
Delivery
A practical way to cut version one down to the one or two workflows that actually prove the idea.
Read nextPlatform
Firebase is often dismissed as only a startup toy, but it is a strong fit for many small internal systems, portals, and workflow products when the boundaries are chosen carefully.
Read nextThe estimator is where these ideas turn into a real budget range, timeline, and itemized cost breakdown for your specific project.
The previous version hinted at pricing. The current version is much closer to the first serious project conversation.
It asks about project type, audience, roles, integrations, design polish, platforms, hosting posture, and ongoing support, then translates those answers into named cost lines.
That matters because opaque quotes are hard to trust and even harder to adjust.
If AI genuinely reduces effort, that reduction should be legible.
Showing the discount as its own negative line item makes the delivery-speed claim auditable. The buyer can see the baseline, the savings, and the resulting range instead of being asked to trust a fuzzy promise about efficiency.
The estimator is intentionally transparent, but it is not the final backend authority yet. The next logical layer is deeper server-backed pricing authority, richer content presets, and lead-hand-off analysis that uses the same vocabulary from the wizard.