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Idea Estimator

Free AI Software Project Estimator

Talk through what you want to build, migrate, or change — and shape the estimate as you go. Free, no signup required.

See what others are building →

Describe your project, migration, or technical problem. I'll ask a few questions and build a live estimate.

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Your estimate will take shape here as we talk.

Each estimate contains

Complexity score
A 1–10 rating with the reasoning behind it, not just a number.
Recommended stack
Frontend, backend, infrastructure, and a suggested hosting approach.
Workstreams
The pieces of work involved, each tagged low, medium, or high effort.
Key considerations
The decisions and risks that will actually move the timeline.
Two timelines
A solo-developer estimate next to a small-team-with-AI estimate.
Suggested approach
A short architecture summary describing how to build it.

How it works

  1. 1

    Describe it

    Write what you want to build, migrate, or replace — plain English, no form fields.

  2. 2

    Answer a few questions

    The estimator asks about scale, integrations, and constraints where they change the answer.

  3. 3

    Watch the estimate take shape

    The card beside the conversation updates as you talk — complexity, stack, workstreams, timelines.

  4. 4

    Build it or take it away

    Hand the estimate to the agent swarm, or keep it as scoping input. No email required either way.

Example estimates

Five projects people estimate here, and what each one forces the estimate to reason about. Click any of them to run it.

  • New SaaS build

    A SaaS dashboard that tracks developer productivity across our GitHub repos

    What it weighs: Multi-tenant data model, GitHub API rate limits and backfill, metric definitions, auth and billing, and how much of the UI is genuinely custom.

  • Cloud exit

    Exit AWS and move our workloads to bare-metal servers we run ourselves

    What it weighs: Which managed services have no self-hosted equal, data egress and cutover windows, the ops load you are taking on, and what has to be rebuilt versus lifted as-is.

  • Migration

    Migrate a legacy Rails monolith to a modular service architecture

    What it weighs: Where the seams actually are, shared database ownership, the strangler path that keeps the app shippable throughout, and test coverage before you start moving things.

  • Developer tool

    A CLI tool that automates database migrations with safe rollbacks

    What it weighs: Which engines you support, how rollbacks behave on partially applied migrations, distribution and versioning, and the failure modes worth designing for up front.

  • Mobile app

    A mobile app for field technicians that works offline and syncs when back online

    What it weighs: Conflict resolution on sync, local storage and schema migration on-device, native versus cross-platform, and app store release mechanics.

How is this different from other project estimators?

Most estimator tools are a form and a lead-capture gate: fill in the fields, hand over an email, wait for a PDF. This one is a conversation. You describe the project, it asks the questions that actually change the answer, and the estimate rebuilds itself in front of you as you go.

There is no signup wall, no email required, and nothing to download — you can read your estimate the moment it exists. It also covers work that isn't a greenfield build: migrations, refactors, and infrastructure moves like leaving a cloud provider.

And when the estimate looks right, you don't have to take it somewhere else to act on it. Parallel AI coding agents can decompose it into tasks and start building on isolated git branches, with AI code review on every branch before anything merges.

Idea estimator FAQ

Is the idea estimator free?
Yes — it's free and needs no signup. Anonymous visitors get three replies per conversation, a free account raises that to ten, and paid plans are unlimited.
What does an estimate contain?
A complexity score out of ten with the reasoning behind it, a recommended tech stack, the workstreams involved with an effort level each, key considerations, a suggested approach, and a solo-developer timeline next to a small-team-with-AI timeline.
How accurate are the estimates?
Treat them as a starting point for scoping, not a quote. The estimate reflects what you described — the more detail you give about scale, integrations, and constraints, the closer it gets.
What kinds of projects can it estimate?
New builds, migrations, refactors, and infrastructure moves such as leaving a cloud provider. Anything you can describe in plain English.
How is this different from other project estimator tools?
It's a conversation, not a form. You refine the estimate by talking through the details, and there's no lead-capture gate — no email required to see your result.
Can Factory Nexus build what I estimated?
Yes. Every estimate can be handed straight to the agent swarm, which decomposes it into tasks and starts building on isolated branches.