2026-07-15 · 6 min read
How we ship production apps in weeks (without cutting corners)
"Live in weeks" sounds like a marketing line, so let's be specific about the mechanics. Plixy ships production web and mobile apps in two to five weeks — not prototypes, not demos, apps with auth, payments, and monitoring that real users pay for. Here's where that speed comes from, and where it doesn't.
Fixed scope is a speed feature
Most software projects aren't slow because engineers type slowly. They're slow because nobody decided what's being built. Open-ended scope means every week introduces new requirements, every meeting reopens old decisions, and the codebase quietly accumulates three abandoned directions.
We front-load the deciding. Before code, you get a written scope: the core flows, what's explicitly out, and a fixed price. That document isn't bureaucracy — it's the reason weeks three and four are spent building instead of renegotiating. Changes still happen; they just happen transparently, with a cost attached, instead of silently eating the timeline.
What AI actually accelerates
Roughly 70% of app development is mechanical: scaffolding screens, CRUD endpoints, form validation, test suites, migrations, integration glue. This is the work AI genuinely does well — and we lean on it hard, running agentic coding workflows as a daily practice, not an experiment. It's the same tooling our founder has run in production systems serving thousands of users.
That 70% used to be why agencies quoted three months. It's now days. But — and this is the part the 'AI will build your app' pitch skips — the remaining 30% is where products live or die.
Where humans are non-negotiable
- ▸Architecture and data modeling — the decisions that are expensive to change later, made before the first sprint
- ▸Edge cases and failure modes — what happens when the payment webhook arrives twice, or the user's connection drops mid-upload
- ▸Security and access control — never generated, always reasoned about
- ▸Product judgment — knowing which feature to cut when it threatens the launch date
Every line of generated code gets reviewed with the same skepticism you'd apply to a fast junior developer. The output is useful; none of it gets trusted by default. AI writes a lot of our code. It makes none of our decisions.
A boring stack, on purpose
TypeScript, React, React Native, PostgreSQL, battle-tested cloud infrastructure. Nothing exotic, nothing that only we can maintain. Novel frameworks are a tax your future developers pay — and speed you don't actually feel, because the bottleneck was never the framework.
Milestones keep everyone honest
Every project is split into milestones that end in a working demo — software you can click, not a status report. You approve each milestone before paying for the next. If we're off track, you know in week one, not week twelve. That structure is also why we can offer a full refund on the first milestone: the risk window is small by design.
The speed comes from cutting waste
Nothing above involves working faster in the sweatshop sense. The weeks we save were never engineering time — they were handoffs between account managers and developers, meetings about meetings, and requirements rediscovered halfway through. Remove the waste, automate the mechanical, keep senior judgment on everything that matters. That's the whole trick.
Building something and want it live before the quarter ends? Tell us about it — we respond within one business day with honest next steps, even if the honest answer is that you don't need us.