UBIKON.ioTimeline Estimator
A week-by-week phase breakdown for your scope, plus the three factors that most often slip a timeline.
No email required for results.
6–10 weeks
| Discovery & scoping | Week 0–1 |
| Design | Week 1–3 |
| Build | Week 2–8 |
| Test & QA | Week 7–9 |
| Launch | Week 9–10 |
What most commonly slips a timeline
- Scope growing mid-build after the first working version is visible
- Third-party integrations (payment providers, app store review) taking longer than the vendor's own docs suggest
- Design sign-off cycles stretching past the plan when stakeholders see the product for the first time
How this is calculated
Phase splits (discovery, design, build, test, launch) are proportioned from real delivered project timelines at each complexity band, not an even five-way division of the total.
Straight answers
What people ask about timelines
How long does it take to build an app? +
Between 3 and 16 weeks for most products: web applications from 3 weeks, MVPs 4-10, mobile apps 4-12, SaaS platforms and AI agent systems 6-16. The single largest variable is not scope but decision speed — projects where one person can approve a design in a day routinely ship weeks earlier than identical projects awaiting committee sign-off.
What most commonly causes a timeline to slip? +
Four things, in order: slow feedback on weekly builds, third-party integrations with poor documentation or sandbox limits, content and asset delivery from the client side, and scope added mid-build without a corresponding date change. Notably, engineering complexity is rarely the cause — it is estimated up front. The other four are all coordination problems.
Can you build it faster if I pay more? +
Somewhat, and less than you would hope. Compressing a 10-week build into 6 is possible for some scopes and costs more than the same work at a normal pace, because parallelising work adds coordination overhead and increases defect rates. Beyond roughly a 30% compression the quality cost stops being worth it, and you will be told that rather than sold the compression.
When do I see something working? +
Every week, from the first week. You get a build you can open, a video walkthrough and a written changelog — not a status percentage. There is no end-of-project reveal, which is the single practice that most reliably prevents a timeline surprise at week eight.