Answers to the common questions.
What teams usually ask before engaging. If yours isn't here, ask us on a discovery call.
Working with us
What does a typical engagement look like?
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Fixed-scope, fixed-fee engagements from a 72-hour prototype sprint to a 6-week production RAG build, plus monthly retainers. See /engagements for specifics.
How fast can we start?
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Usually within two weeks. For a 72-hour AI Prototype Sprint, often the following Friday.
Do you work with teams that already have AI engineers?
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Often, yes. We frequently partner with in-house teams on specialist work (evals, MCP, cloud AI infra) or as extra senior capacity during a rollout.
Where are you based?
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Kansas City, US and Tokyo, Japan. We work remote-first with clients across North America and Asia.
Who does the actual work?
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Senior operators on every engagement. We do not subcontract to junior teams or offshore delivery shops.
Scope & technical fit
Which model providers do you work with?
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We are provider-agnostic. OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex, Cohere, Voyage. We choose on the numbers — your constraints, cost, latency, and evals.
AWS, Azure, or GCP?
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Whichever you already run. AWS-native → Bedrock. Azure shop → Azure OpenAI. GCP → Vertex. Cross-cloud works but rarely worth the operational cost until scale demands it.
Do you do fine-tuning?
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Yes, but only after prompting, retrieval, and model selection have run out of room. Fine-tuning pays off later than most teams expect. See the Fine-Tuning solution page.
Can you work with our existing stack?
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Yes. We are not religious about tools. If you run Postgres with pgvector, we do not stand up a new vector DB just to show off.
Do you build MCP servers?
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Yes — it is one of our signature capabilities. See /mcp for the full picture.
Pricing
How much does an engagement cost?
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72-hour prototype sprint: $5,000 fixed. 2-week evaluation audit: $25,000 fixed. Production builds: from $45-75k. Ongoing partnerships: from $20k/month retainer. See /engagements for the full menu.
Fixed fee or hourly?
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Fixed fee for defined scope. Retainers for ongoing capacity. We do not bill hourly — it incentivizes the wrong things.
What happens if the scope changes mid-engagement?
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We hold the original scope at the original price and discuss change orders for additions. No surprise invoices.
Do you offer equity / deferred engagements for early-stage startups?
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Occasionally, on a case-by-case basis. We will tell you honestly whether it fits us both.
Security & compliance
Are you HIPAA or SOC 2 certified?
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We are a consulting firm, not a certified platform. We build posture that meets the controls — private endpoints, KMS, audit logging, DLP — and hand off to your compliance team for attestation. See /security.
Can you sign a BAA?
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Where a cloud provider offers a BAA for the relevant services (Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, etc.), we deploy under your covered-entity environment and comply with the engagement-level BAA you have with us.
Do you sign NDAs?
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Yes. Standard mutual NDA before we review any client data.
Where does our data live?
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In your cloud, your region, your accounts. We operate inside your environment with scoped, time-bound credentials.
Hand-off & ownership
What do we own at the end of an engagement?
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Everything: code, prompts, eval datasets, infrastructure as code, runbooks, and documentation. You can take over from us on day one.
Do you lock us into your tools?
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No. We pick open formats and standard tools your team can run without us. Hand-off is a feature, not a risk.
What happens after the engagement?
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Options: (a) your team owns it and calls us occasionally, (b) we continue on a retainer for capacity, or (c) an ad-hoc relationship for specific needs (upgrades, audits, evals).
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