Thirteen honest answers.

From the first call, the free diagnosis takes 45 minutes. The working demo, on your real data, takes 7-10 days. Full production build is 4-6 weeks after that for most commissions. Clients typically go from "we should look at this" to "the system is live" in about eight weeks.

No. We build on whatever makes sense for your stack, your data-governance posture, and your cost targets. Most engagements use a mix of frontier models (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini) with open-source models for the parts where privacy or cost matters. You own the orchestration. You can swap providers at any time.

Then we haven't earned the engagement, and we don't ask for money. You keep the memo from the diagnosis and whatever we learned together. Roughly one in six diagnoses don't turn into engagements, usually because the real problem turned out to be organizational, not technical.

You do. From day one. Every repo is in your GitHub org, every prompt is in your vault, every model weight you fine-tune is yours to keep. There is no runtime we control and no license you rent. If our firm disappeared tomorrow, your system would continue running unchanged.

Our smallest commission is $45,000 for a focused four-week build. Below that, we typically refer you to a freelancer or a productized tool. We're genuinely not a fit for problems under that size, the overhead of the diagnosis-demo-commission process isn't worth it for small work.

Yes. Our standard NDA is short, mutual, and available for redline on request. We sign client NDAs without friction as long as they don't restrict our ability to publish anonymized case studies in the form you see on this site (numbers and outcomes, no identifying details).

That's what the optional stewardship retainer is for, and why handoff includes training, a runbook, and a written architecture document written for a future engineer we'll never meet. Most clients operate the system in-house after the first 90 days. A handful keep us on the small retainer for a year, then don't need us.

Agencies typically operate at scale: many clients, pooled teams, marketing-led. We take four commissions a quarter, run every build principal-led, and charge fixed fees against scoped deliverables. We're closer in model to a private architecture practice than a software agency.

Most of our engagements are with companies that have engineering leadership. We embed, we document, we transfer. On handoff, your CTO owns the system fully and has everything they need to maintain and extend it. A few clients have us build, then assign an internal engineer full-time starting week four, it works well.

Professional services, B2B SaaS, media and content businesses, e-commerce and DTC, and specialty manufacturing. We're not a fit for regulated healthcare, consumer mobile, or pure-B2C. Not because we can't do it, because we don't have the pattern recognition to be worth our fee in those categories.

Rarely. The diagnosis-and-demo process replaces most of what an RFP would try to test. If you genuinely need a formal RFP process, we're probably not the right fit, not out of principle, but because the overhead would price us out of competitiveness.

Yes. Our line at (617) 675-9067 is answered 24 hours a day by an AI receptionist who takes down what you need, your name, and a callback number. A principal calls you back the same day, usually within a few hours. If you would rather skip the receptionist and write to us, the diagnosis form is the fastest path, but the phone genuinely works at three in the morning.

Boston, MA. We travel for kickoffs and handoffs when it makes sense, usually once per engagement, at our expense. Most of the build runs on weekly video reviews plus an async build-log you can read any time.