the parts most people find out about afterwards.
what ships with every build, when i'm reachable, what you can hold me to, and where your data goes. published here so you don't have to ask.
the call, then a number
fifteen minutes on video. an nda before anything sensitive moves. within 48 hours you have a fixed fee, a fixed scope, a date, and an explicit list of what isn't included.
map
i sit with you and the people who actually do the work. every manual process gets written down and costed in hours and money. you get the map whether or not you go further, and it's yours to hand to someone else.
remove
the cheapest thing that works, built properly. a demo every week — you see it working, or not working, while there's still time to change direction. a checkpoint at the halfway mark where stopping is a real option.
scope changes are quoted before they're built, never after.
handover
code, documentation, credentials, runbook. a recorded walkthrough for whoever will own it. then thirty days of tuning, included, because the first month is when the real edge cases arrive.
maintain, if you want it
the retainer is optional and cancellable. declining it doesn't leave you stranded — that's the point of the handover above.
evaluations
anything with a model in it gets a test set and a score. "it seemed fine when i tried it" is not a measurement.
error handling
malformed documents, rate limits, schema changes, duplicates, confident wrong answers. the failure paths are the work.
monitoring & alerts
every system reports whether it ran and whether it was right. alerts reach me, not just a dashboard nobody opens.
runbook
what to do when it breaks and i'm asleep, written for someone who isn't an engineer.
no lock-in
standard tools, your accounts, your repository. another engineer could pick it up on monday.
training
a system nobody on your team understands is a liability with a monthly cost. handover includes the people, not just the files.
most automation that fails in production didn't fail because the idea was wrong. it failed because none of the six things on the left were done.
they're not upgrades or line items. they ship with every build at the price on the page.
i work from india. that's a scheduling detail, and here is exactly what it means. these are held hours, not best efforts.
video first. i'd rather spend fifteen minutes on a call than four days in email.
- a reply within the overlap hours above, same working day
- a working demo every week during a build
- a fixed number in writing within 48 hours of any request
- the audit fee back if i can't find you five hours a week
- no invoice you haven't already agreed to in writing
- no-code demos. they work in the meeting and fail in production. i'm frequently the person who replaces them.
- hunting for a big project. if the answer is a $50 monthly subscription, that's what you'll be told.
- account managers. the person who scopes the work writes every line of it.
- staffing by the hour. fixed scope, fixed price, fixed date. never a timesheet.
- evangelism. plenty of processes shouldn't be automated at all. i'll say so.
nda first
signed before anything sensitive is discussed, not after we've agreed to work together.
your infrastructure
systems run in your cloud accounts under your api keys. your data doesn't sit on my machines.
minimum access
i take the least access that does the job, and hand it back at the end of the engagement.
still deciding whether any of this applies to you?
that's what the call is for. fifteen minutes, no slides. if i can't help, i'll tell you who can.