What AI development covers here
A real AI development engagement is four layers, not one prompt wired to a button. The data layer ingests whatever you already have, a legacy database, a spreadsheet export, a stream of events, and gets it into a shape a model can use. The model layer sits behind a single interface in your codebase so it can be swapped, fine-tuned, or run offline without touching a dozen call sites when a provider changes terms or a better model ships.
On top of that sits an evaluation suite: a real test set that catches a regression before a customer does, instead of a demo that only ever gets run once. And then the product surface, the screen, the API, the Slack bot, or the agent a person or another system actually talks to. Skip any of the four and what you have is a wrapper around someone else's API, not a system.
We build all four together, because they fail together. A model with no eval suite drifts silently. A pipeline with no product surface never gets used. The engineers who write the ingestion code are the same ones who write the UI, so nothing gets lost in a handoff between teams.
Custom build or off-the-shelf: when each wins
If the task is generic, drafting text, summarizing a public document, a feature already inside a tool you pay for will do the job for less than any development engagement costs. We will say that on the first call if it is true, rather than scope a build you did not need.
A custom build earns its cost under three conditions: the value comes from data nobody else has, your workflow does not match what a generic SaaS tool assumes, or you have a compliance requirement, a signed BAA, an audit log, data that has to stay inside your own cloud, that a horizontal product cannot meet. Most of what we build sits in one of those three buckets.
We are also honest about scale in the other direction. A modernization program spanning a dozen departments and hundreds of engineers is a different problem than a scoped build, and calls for a different kind of firm than a pod. We tell you which situation you are in instead of trying to fit every problem into our own shape.
How we keep a model from becoming a liability
A model in production is a liability the moment nobody is watching what it does. Every build ships with an evaluation harness that grades outputs against a real test set, so quality is measured before release, not felt after a complaint. Where an agent takes action, it runs against your real systems through scoped tool use with guardrails and approval steps, and every call it makes writes to an audit log you can read.
Data stays inside your own cloud account or VPC where your compliance requires it, not inside ours. We do not train models on your data. If you want a model tuned on your own data, we build that on request and it stays yours, the same way the rest of the system does.
Deployment inside your own environment, code review on every pull request, typed contracts, and tests in CI apply to AI-assisted code the same way they apply to anything else the pod writes. Nothing skips the gate because a model wrote the first draft.
What it costs and how the pod is staffed
Pricing is published, not quoted after a sales call. A Builder Pod is $7,500 a month: one active build track, a pod lead plus a two-engineer bench, weekly ship, month-to-month with 30 days notice. A Growth Pod is $10,000 a month: two concurrent tracks, a pod lead plus a three-engineer bench, weekly ship plus a bi-weekly strategy call. Enterprise engagements, three or more parallel tracks with a dedicated senior lead, are scoped in a meeting because the shape varies too much for a single number.
A small, single-track build typically runs one to three months. A medium build spanning multiple workflows and data sources typically runs three to twelve months. There is no hourly billing and no change orders, you are billed for capacity, and the pod lead who scopes the work is the same person accountable for shipping it.