What rescue services publish
We checked five services that take AI-built prototypes to production. One publishes prices. The rest agree a price after a call or a review.
| Service | Published price | Published timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Justin McKelvey — Vibe Code Rescue | From $15K (light) · $25K–$50K (typical) · $60K–$100K (complex SaaS) | 4–8 weeks |
| App Corp | Not published — estimate on a call | About 4 weeks on average |
| Wavect | Not published | “A few weeks” |
| Future Wonder | Not published | Not published |
| vibecoderescue.com | Not published — agreed before review | Not published |
| Pricient | From $7,500 — fixed once your spec is agreed | Live 3 weeks after the spec is agreed |
Checked on 2 October 2026. Prices change — confirm on each provider’s page.
Why the quotes are so far apart
The same prototype can be quoted at very different prices. One reason sits in the document itself: most quotes say what they include and stay silent on what they leave out. Two numbers are only comparable when both show the scope in writing — what is in, and what is not.
What actually drives the cost
Prototype tools build what you asked for, quickly. The cost of production sits in what nobody asked for. These are the areas that decide a rescue price:
| Area | What goes wrong in production without it |
|---|---|
| Sign-in and sessions | Locked-out users, hijacked sessions, no way to recover an account |
| Who can read which data | One customer sees another customer’s records |
| Secrets exposed to the public | Anyone can run up bills on your paid services |
| Payments | Money and records disagree; refunds become manual |
| Test coverage | Every fix breaks something else |
| Monitoring | You hear about outages from customers |
| Compliance | Health or EU personal data without the controls an auditor will ask for |
| Integrations | Systems of record have owners, rate limits and their own sign-in |
| Scale | It falls over the first time real traffic arrives |
Screen count matters far less than how many of these the prototype skipped — and which ones your business actually needs on day one.
Rescue or rebuild?
Usually neither extreme. A working prototype already holds the screens, the flows and many of the decisions; that is most of a requirements document. Whatever a provider proposes to keep or rewrite, ask for it in writing, in the quote — not in a call.
Five questions to ask any rescue quote
- What is not included? Ask for the list in writing. Password reset, notifications and a second language are the usual silent extras.
- What does the price assume? Number of users, languages, who provides the content. A wrong assumption should trigger a re-quote, not an argument.
- Are tests and a security review lines in the quote — or a sentence in the proposal?
- How long does the price hold?
- How is a change priced — before you approve it, or on the invoice?
How Pricient quotes a rescue
Describe what you built and what broke. Today a person runs the intake with you by email. Before you pay anything you receive the specification, wireframes of every screen, the Not in this release list with backlog prices, the assumptions register and a three-tier itemized quote — locked for 14 days.
The launch-ready MVP starts from $7,500, fixed once your spec is agreed: live 3 weeks after the spec is agreed, security-hardened, 80% test coverage and three months of support. Code you share is read-only, logged, never used for training, and deleted within 30 days of the evaluation ending unless we engage.