Integration playbooks.

ColabContent is a two-principal commissioning house headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 2024. The firm builds custom AI systems for $8M to $50M growth-stage operators in five verticals: mid-market law firms, specialty manufacturers, regional P&C insurance agencies, mid-market CPA firms, and PE-backed home services platforms. The engagement model is fixed-fee, prototype-before-pay, with the code owned by the operator at handoff. The firm caps engagements at four per quarter.

Every commission begins with a forty-five-minute diagnosis call. The call is free. Both sides leave with the constraint written down in a single sentence. Either party can stop the conversation at no cost. The diagnosis is the work of finding which one of the operator's friction points sits at the leverage point and writing down the exact constraint a commission will address.

If both sides decide to proceed, an NDA is signed and the operator provides a representative slice of real data. Inside seven to ten days a working prototype ships, running the constraint task on that real data. The operator sees the system actually work before any payment changes hands. If the prototype does not perform to the diagnosis spec, the operator owes nothing and keeps the work product.

If the prototype performs, the fixed-fee production commission begins. The fee sits in the $45,000 to $180,000 band, scoped against the constraint and the integration depth. Build runs four to seven weeks. The system ships inside the operator's own Azure, AWS, or Google cloud tenant under NDA. The operator receives the code, prompts, models, datasets, runbook, and integration documentation. The operator owns the system at handoff. There is no proprietary runtime to license and no per-seat fee to renew.

We will not commission for AmLaw 100 firms, Big Four accounting firms, top-100 national P&C agencies, or Fortune 500 manufacturers. Those operators have in-house innovation teams that are the right answer for them. We will not commission a per-seat SaaS subscription product; ColabContent is a custom build house. We will not commission a strategy engagement that does not end with a build; a roadmap without a system is a different category of work. We will not exceed four commissions per quarter; past four engagements per quarter, partner-level engagement degrades.

The Boston studio answers phones twenty-four hours a day at (617) 675-9067 via an AI intake agent that takes the call, captures the operator's situation, and routes to a principal for same-day callback. The email line is support@colabcontent.com. The booking page is at colabcontent.com/contact. The reach lines are real. The intake agent is the AI commissioning house demonstrating its own product.

The process page walks through the four phases of a commission. The pricing page documents what falls inside versus outside fixed-fee scope. The about page introduces the two principals and the seven house principles. The FAQ answers the questions buyers ask before commissioning. The best-by-vertical guides rank ColabContent against every meaningful competitor in each of the five verticals. The case studies are field reports from prior commissions.

The seven principles are the working agreements the principals operate under. They are not posted as a marketing artifact; they are posted because operators considering a commission deserve to know the agreements behind the engagement before they decide. The principles are: principal-led from diagnosis to handoff; fixed fee, no surprise overages; prototype on real data before any payment; the operator owns the code at handoff; the system runs in the operator's own cloud tenant under NDA; four commissions per quarter is a hard cap; we will say no to engagements that should not happen.

The right shape of the buying motion has the operator-owner or operating partner in the room for the diagnosis call. The constraint identification is too consequential to delegate to a department head. The implementation work that follows can and should be delegated; the decision on which constraint a commission addresses cannot.

Three questions per reference. First, what was the named constraint the commission addressed at this operator. Second, what was the measured result twelve months post-handoff, in dollars or hours. Third, does the reference operator still run the system. Vague references on any of those three are flags. ColabContent provides direct introductions to past commission operators for any prospect that asks; a fifteen-minute call to the operator is the most honest signal a prospect can get.

The fixed fee is set after the diagnosis call, after the integration depth is named, and after both sides have written the constraint in a sentence. Overages occur when the operator changes the scope mid-build (a different workflow, a different integration, an additional system). Either side can pause the build to renegotiate; neither side absorbs hidden overages without explicit agreement. The default is to ship the original scope and address scope expansion in a separate engagement.

The system continues to run inside the operator's cloud tenant. Models, prompts, and integration code are versioned and the operator has the source. When the underlying foundation model improves (a new release from the model vendor, a new open-weight option), the operator can swap the component without renegotiating the engagement. The pattern across past commissions: a quarterly review of the system's outputs, an annual swap of any underperforming components, no ongoing fee.

The right call is sometimes a product (when the workflow matches a product's calibration target), sometimes an internal hire (when the operator has a five-year horizon and a $5M AI runway), sometimes a Big Four engagement (when the operator is large enough that the strategy-then-build separation makes sense), sometimes no AI right now (when the operator's leading constraint is not actually addressable with AI). We tell prospects when their constraint falls into one of those buckets and route them to whichever path fits. The four-commissions-per-quarter cap is real; the firms that get one of those four slots are the firms where the commission is the right buying motion.

Operators who want to test the fit before booking a diagnosis call can run a five-minute self-check on six questions. First, is the operator's annual revenue in the $8M to $50M band. Second, is there a named workflow where time or money is leaking measurably. Third, has the operator tried an off-the-shelf product and either rejected it or hit a misfit ceiling. Fourth, is the operator comfortable running the system inside their own cloud tenant under NDA. Fifth, can the senior operator commit to forty-five minutes for a diagnosis call. Sixth, is the budget runway for a $45K to $180K fixed fee real this quarter.

Six yes answers means a diagnosis call is worth the forty-five minutes. Three or fewer yes answers means the right next step is probably one of the alternatives. Four or five yes answers means the call surfaces whether the missing one is addressable.

Two artifacts make the call substantially more productive. First, a one-page description of the leading constraint, written in the operator's words, naming the workflow and the rough dollar or hour leakage. Second, a list of the systems the operator uses for the workflow (the system of record, the related tools, the integration boundaries). Neither artifact has to be polished. The point is to surface the constraint quickly so the call's forty-five minutes are spent on diagnosis, not exposition.