How long does it take to ship? And how long the answer stays short.
What "ship time" actually means in a written-scope engagement — what stretches the day count, and why the cadence, not the bid-shop timeline, is published up front.
Ship time is a product of three inputs.
The honest answer to “how long does it take to ship?” is a range, not a number. Time-to-ship = correct surface in days× tier × acceptance criteria. Every one of those three inputs is set in writing before the first PR opens — and none of them moves without an appended note in the daily stand-up so the founder can see what changed and why.
The range varies by tier; the cadence is published regardless. That’s the line we draw here, and it’s the line the rest of this post is built around.
One milestone, or a monthly retainer with a published cadence.
Starter is one scoped ship: a single milestone, kickoff through merged PR, typically two to four weeks end-to-end. Growth and Scale are monthly retainers with the same published cadence — daily async stand-up before 09:00 local, a Friday release digest summarising what merged that week, a monthly founder session reviewing the next slice. The unit of measurement is capacity, not man-hours against a timesheet.
What each tier carries in writing, including response SLAs and the named-lead surface, is documented on the pricing page.
Vague briefs. Scope drift. Missing credentials on day one.
The variables that stretch the timeline are concrete and countable. A vague brief — one paragraph where five are needed — adds roughly a week to a Starter milestone. Unclear acceptance criteria force a re-scoping round before PRs can land. Scope drift after sign-off resets the clock. Missing credentials on day one block the first deploy until the founder finds them.
A sharp brief keeps the milestone on schedule. The contrast with the bid-shop model is that the timeline gets picked after the proposal round there; here, the cadence and ship-date estimate both appear in writing inside the scoping document — before the first invoice is sent.
A written scope, with timelines, before the calendar invite.
A written scope lands within 72 hours of intake. Inside it, the start date and the ship-date estimate both appear together. The brief becomes a set of measurable inputs; the scope becomes a published contract on timing — revised without an invoice if it’s wrong, signed off before work starts if it’s right.
Founders with a rough idea but no written brief answer five short questions on /scope; a written scope (timelines and all) comes back without a calendar invite. Tier cadence, response SLAs, and what each level of retainer carries in writing live on the pricing page.
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Liked the read? Send the work, get a scope back.
Send the rough idea through the intake form. We come back with a written scope within 72 hours, and we don’t send invoices until you’ve signed off on it.
Or email wingman-stack@polsia.app with a one-paragraph brief.