A working day for your product team, founder or management team with an app idea you want to test properly before investing €35,000, €100,000 or more in development. No brainstorm with sticky notes and no no-code demo. In one structured day we go from an idea in your head to a clickable prototype on your screen, plus an honest roadmap with phasing and a cost order of magnitude. By the end of the day you will know whether this idea is worth pursuing, and what the next step concretely involves.
Plan a working day View the programmeMost app ideas do not fail because they are technically unfeasible, but because the scope, the user problem and the business model were not sharp enough when developer days were bought. A structured working day brings that discussion forward, before you commit to a months-long project.
For concepts where the build cost is substantial. A working day costs a fraction of that, and filters out cases where it later turns out the real use case lay somewhere other than you thought. Investors and boards value that you have a prototype in hand before asking for budget.
The founder sees feature A as the core, marketing wants feature B up front, developers ask for feature C for scalability. A shared working day with outside-in facilitation brings three versions together into one clickable prototype everyone agrees on.
Half of the time in a serious app project goes into integrations, not new screens. CRM, ERP, payments, identity, GDPR compliance. Mapping out in a single working day which integrations your idea genuinely requires prevents surprises worth tens of thousands later.
Not every app needs to be built. A day with people who have seen hundreds of apps up close gives you grounds to proceed, to pivot the idea, or to deliberately stop. The advice is put in writing, even if the advice is that you are better off not building.
A handful of tangible artefacts, not a management summary of a whiteboard session. Material you can present straight away to stakeholders, co-investors or a future development team.
A series of core screens connected to one another, demonstrable on your laptop. We work AI-assisted with v0 and Cursor, but every screen choice is reviewed by an experienced product designer before it lands in the prototype. Not a disposable mock-up: the file can be built on directly by another dev team.
Which stack fits, which integrations are needed, how GDPR-compliant the build will be, and in which phases it can go live. Concrete enough to take to a development partner, or as a basis for your own team to start from. Including realistic sequencing, so you can validate step by step rather than building everything at once.
Not an exact quote, but a substantiated range. We work with ranges that match what the market typically asks for this type of work, so you can weigh whether it fits your budget and business case. The figures are based on concrete sprint estimation, not guesswork.
A written recommendation, drawn up after the workshop day and sent to you shortly afterwards. We give a reasoned verdict: the idea is strong enough to pursue, it is strong but the scope needs to change, or it is not strong enough and you would be better off not building it. Candid and well-argued, because a workshop day that honestly advises against the idea costs far less than a months-long project in which you discover that for yourself.
We agree the exact timings and length of each phase with your team and the complexity of the idea. What is fixed is the sequence, as each phase builds on the one before. We build in breaks and buffer time, because a group of people cannot think clearly about their own product for hours on end.
We start with the person on the other side. Not with features, but with who is affected by something and what change is wanted. Stakeholders who thought they were talking about the same thing often discover their first scope corrections at this stage.
We sketch by hand: the core screens and how a user moves through them. Decisions about which information goes where, which actions are prominent, and what error paths look like. Deliberately analogue, so that AI or tooling does not make early choices on the team's behalf.
The team works in parallel on flows in Figma and on working UI components using tools such as v0 and Cursor. The whole team looks on regularly and you steer the direction. At the end you have screens that can be clicked through and that behave realistically. Every design decision remains with the people involved; AI speeds up the working out.
We put together the direction of the roadmap: architecture, phasing, cost ranges. Then we review the day with the group: is there a product here worth pursuing, or do we see reasons to stop? This conversation sometimes runs counter to the marketing enthusiasm of that morning, and that is precisely why we hold it.
Not every team gets value from a single day. The list below makes clear in advance whether you belong here, before you invest time and money in a workshop day.
A workshop day in 2026 is not the same as one in 2022. AI tooling significantly speeds up the production of screens. But without an experienced designer and developer overseeing it, AI produces inconsistent flows and plausible-looking but unusable screens. Our method combines both.
Figma for screens and design systems. v0 and Cursor for generating working UI components. Claude for copy suggestions and flow validation. Astro or Next.js for the prototype build, with Tailwind for styling. Everything open source or widely available.
AI tooling speeds up the working out of screens considerably. The difference from sketching by hand lies in turnaround time, not in the quality of the thinking. The decisions remain with people.
AI hallucinates UX. Screens look good at first glance but contain patterns that break in production. An AI-generated form doesn't know the specific validation requirements your sector has. The designer and developer review every screen before it enters the flow, and discard what doesn't work.
Building a prototype in a working day has become a commodity. There are no-code agencies, freelance product designers, and agencies that run "design sprints". All of them can deliver a prototype. Our added value lies in what can be built from it afterwards.
A no-code prototype is fine until the moment you want to scale, integrate with your ERP or comply with the GDPR. We design in a working day, in a stack we run ourselves in production, for healthcare, transport and finance clients. No prototype that has to be rebuilt for production.
An agency that also wants to sell the build has a conflict of interest during the working day. We often have to advise a team to stop, because an idea that looks strong on paper doesn't survive in practice. We put that in writing, even if it costs us a future project. Our reputation weighs more heavily.
Our designers and developers have conducted hundreds of user interviews, have watched apps fall over in production on integrations, and know which assumptions in a prototype usually prove naïve. That experience is in the room during the working day, and guides the screen choices and the roadmap phasing.
Appfront works from Westerdoksdijk 599 in Amsterdam with a fixed team. The same designer and developer who sit with you on the working day are available if you decide to build after the day, or they will provide a well-founded referral to a specialised team if your use case suits that better.
Practical logistics of the working day, as far as it is sensible to set these out in advance. We'll agree the rest in a thirty-minute intake call a week before the day itself.
The most common questions before we plan the working day, with honest answers.
No. We're deliberately honest about this: building a working production app takes weeks to months, not one day. What you get after this day is a clickable prototype that behaves like the real app, plus a roadmap to production. Companies that promise a working app on the App Store after a single working day are either delivering a no-code shell you'll never get beyond, or stretching the meaning of "working" until it no longer means anything.
The AI Design Sprint is a five-day programme for specifically AI-driven products where the core is AI functionality. This App in a day is a single day, for general app ideas where AI may be a component but isn't the whole product. For a general app validation, this one working day is sufficient. For an AI product involving research into models, datasets and LLM orchestration, it takes longer.
The prototype belongs to you. We deliver the Figma file and, if there's a working front-end, the corresponding code in a repository in your name. You can keep it, discard it, or continue building it in-house. There's no lock-in to tooling that only we can open.
A product designer and a senior developer, both with experience in production apps, not just prototypes. We don't send a junior with a template. Before the intake call, we'll try to introduce you to as many of the same people who will facilitate the day as possible, so you can judge in advance whether it's a good fit.
Yes, that's quite common. A working day at your office has the advantage that you can bring colleagues in between sessions for specific input, and the team works in a familiar environment. What we need is a room with a large whiteboard or flipchart, and power sockets. At our Amsterdam office, a comparable space is also available.
It happens. Sometimes we discover in the first session that there are really three products packed into one idea, or that the real use case isn't yet clear. In that case we use the working day to narrow the scope to what's feasible for a prototype, and save the rest for a follow-up conversation. The roadmap you receive will honestly state which part has been prototyped and which part needs further research.
Then that is the outcome. A working day that ends with "we won't build this" is, as far as we're concerned, just as valuable as one that ends with "we're going to build it". In fact, it's cheaper and more honest than a six-month engagement that reaches the same decision anyway. The written advice stays with you, so if you want to revisit it in a year, you'll still have the documents.
The team works in parallel on production projects, so we schedule working days in fixed slots. Request a quote and we'll quickly come back with agenda options that suit you.
Send us a short description of what you have in mind. We'll quickly get back to you with agenda options, a price indication and who from our side would attend. No sales pitch up front, no obligation.
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