The Prototype Run · Five working days · Fixed price
From idea to a URL
in five working days.
For the idea that needs to exist by the board meeting, the demo day, or the first customer call. Not a clickable mockup: real accounts, real data, real deploy. Something true enough to show investors, test on customers, or hand to a developer.
Who this is for
You need it to exist, and you need it to be real.
The Prototype Run is for founders and small teams who need working software on a date: a demo day, a board meeting, a first customer who said "show me." Not slides. Not a Figma click-through. A thing people can sign into and use, that stores what they type, and that you can keep building on afterward instead of throwing away.
It is also for teams who tried building it themselves with an AI tool and got a beautiful front end attached to nothing, and would rather start from something with a real foundation than rescue it later.
What you get is a Rails 8 application, server-rendered, on one database, deployed at a URL, in a GitHub repository you own. It is not a template. It is your product, cut down to the one path that has to work.
The five days
Scope lock, build, deploy, hand over.
The build is fast because the scope is small and the foundation is not built from scratch. Every day you get a link.
-
Day 1
Scope lock
A working session, usually ninety minutes. We find the one path a user has to walk for the prototype to prove its point: sign up, do the thing, see the result. Everything else goes on a written list called Later. Then I sketch the screens for that path so you can see what you are getting before it exists.
A one-page scope, agreed. Screen sketches. The Later list. Nothing ambiguous left for Thursday.
-
Days 2–4
Build
Rails 8, server-rendered with Hotwire, Tailwind for the interface. Real authentication, a real database with real constraints, seed data that looks like your business, transactional email that actually sends. Payments if the prototype needs to prove people will pay. A staging link on day two that gets more real every day.
A daily link and a short end-of-day note. You watch it come together and you catch drift early.
-
Day 5
Deploy and hand over
Live at a URL you can send to anyone, on hosting billed to you. Tests on the paths that matter. A deploy and rollback runbook. A recorded walkthrough of the codebase. A call where you drive it and I answer questions.
Everything in the Handoff Standard. Your repo, your infrastructure, standard Rails.
-
After
Your call
Take it to your own team. Hand it to a developer you hire. Book a second run to build the next path. Or keep it alive on the Roundhouse while you find out whether anyone wants it. There is no lock-in in any direction.
How five days is real
We do not start from zero.
The honest reason a real prototype fits in a week is that the boring 60% is already solved and does not get rebuilt for each client. Every run starts from a hardened, containerized Rails 8 foundation that already has:
- Accounts, sign-in, password reset, and two-factor auth
- Teams and roles, if the product needs them
- Stripe billing and subscriptions, ready to switch on
- Transactional email with a designed layout, both HTML and text
- Background jobs, with retries and failure alerts
- An admin console
- A test suite, linting, and CI that runs on every push
- A one-command containerized development environment, so the next developer is running it in minutes
- Deployment that is written down and repeatable
That leaves five days for the part that is actually yours: the data model, the core workflow, the screens, and the deploy. It is the same reason a locomotive works come out of a shop and not a field: the shop has the jigs.
The foundation is standard Rails and public gems. There is nothing proprietary in it and no dependency on us. That is checked in the Handoff Standard.
Scope, honestly
What a prototype is, and is not.
A working prototype is true enough to show investors, test on customers, and build on. It is not a hardened product serving thousands of paying users, and anyone promising that in a week is selling you a template.
In a run
- One core user path, end to end
- Real accounts, real data, real email
- Payments, if proving payment is the point
- A clean, responsive interface
- Deployed to a URL you can share
- Tests, runbook, walkthrough, your repo
Not in a run
- Every feature on the roadmap. That is the Later list.
- A brand and a design system
- Native mobile apps
- Third-party integrations beyond one or two
- Load and security hardening for scale you do not have
- Ongoing development. Book another run or the Roundhouse.
Prototype questions
Before you book a prototype.
Can anything real be built in five days?
A working prototype, yes: real data, real accounts, deployed where people can use it. A hardened product serving thousands of paying customers, no, and anyone promising that in a week is selling you a template. Five days gets you something true enough to show investors, test on customers, or hand to a developer. What comes after that is a different conversation with a different price.
Where does it get hosted?
Wherever you want that runs Rails: Heroku, Render, Fly, Hatchbox, or a plain VPS with Kamal. If you have no preference, I pick the boring one that costs the least and write down how to move off it. The account is yours and the bill goes to you.
Do you do the design?
Enough to make it real. Prototypes get a clean, server-rendered interface with Tailwind that a designer can restyle later without a rewrite. If you have designs, I build to them. If you want a brand and a design system, that is a different specialist and I can point you to one.
Book a run.
Twenty minutes on a call, free. Describe the idea. I will tell you whether it fits in five days, what would have to be cut to make it fit, and when the next departure is.
Book the 20-minute callbill@atomiclocomotive.com · Austin, Texas · Usually replies same day