Service
Prototype to Ship
Prototype-to-ship is a design engagement that ends in deployed, working software — the studio designs the product and then builds it in production React and TypeScript, removing the handoff entirely.
When teams call us about this
- The last agency delivered a beautiful Figma file and you still needed to find engineers to build it.
- What shipped doesn't match what was designed, and nobody can point to where it diverged.
- You're pre-hire and need something real in front of users or investors, not a clickable illusion.
What's included
Design and build by the same hands
The person drawing the interface is the person implementing it. That kills an entire class of problem — specs that are cheap to draw and brutal to build, transitions that cost a re-render on every keystroke, states that get noted and never made.
Production frontend, not a prototype
Typed React, real data, accessible markup, deployed. Something a stranger can open on a phone, not a demo that only survives the path you rehearsed.
The unglamorous last ten percent
Empty states, error copy, offline behaviour, double-tap, wrong order. The part that decides whether anyone comes back, and the part most engagements run out of budget before reaching.
Handover you can maintain
Readable code, real components, and no dependency on us to keep it running.
How it runs
1
Frame
What has to be true for this to be worth shipping, and what is explicitly out of scope for v1.
2
Design
Fast, in the direction of the build — decisions get pressure-tested against implementation reality as they're made, not after.
3
Ship
Built and deployed. AI accelerates the mechanical work; the judgment about what is actually right stays human.
4
Measure
See how it behaves with real people, then iterate on what the data actually says.
Where we've done it
Every one of these is live and clickable — a working product, not a screenshot.
What an engagement looks like
Prototype-to-ship engagements typically run six to twelve weeks to a live v1, scoped hard around what has to be true for launch. Project-based, or a retainer if you want continued iteration once real users arrive. Agencies use the same arrangement for overflow, under their brand.
When this isn't the right fit
This is the wrong fit if you need deep backend or infrastructure work — we build production frontend and the design that goes with it, not your data platform. It is also wrong if you want a designer to hand mockups to your existing team, because the whole point here is that the same hands do both and you would be paying for a benefit you are not taking. And if your requirements genuinely cannot be cut to a shippable v1, that is a scoping problem worth solving before anyone writes code.
Common questions
Do we get code we can maintain, or a throwaway prototype?
Production code. Typed React and TypeScript, real components, deployed and running — the same stack a team would keep building on. Several of the products on this site were built this way and are live today, which is the check worth making on any studio claiming this: ask for a URL you can open, not a screenshot.
How does AI fit into how you build?
It does the mechanical work and it is genuinely fast at it. It does not do the deciding. A model will happily produce something that runs and solves a slightly different problem than the one you had, and nothing crashes to tell you. The judgment about which of four options is right, and whether the flow is wrong even though it works, is the part that stays human.
What if we already have engineers?
That works well. We take a feature end to end and hand back working code your team reviews, rather than a spec they have to interpret. Agencies and dev shops use us the same way when design demand outruns capacity.
Need help with Prototype to Ship?
The first 30-minute call is free, and it's where we scope it. You'll leave with a clear picture either way.