Phase 03 — Operate

Stay shipping.

Production AI doesn’t stay sharp on its own. Models drift, costs creep, edge cases pile up, and your team has a roadmap for the thing they actually own. We embed as a fractional engineering partner for new features, monitoring, evals, and cost optimization, at a fraction of a senior in-house hire. 30-day exit clause. No retainers without value.

Talk about a retainer See what's included ↓

FIG. AExit clause30days

FIG. BStarting retainer$8K/mo

FIG. CCadenceSlack-first

FIG. DWorking demosWeekly

Sec. 01 — What you get

A senior team, fractionally embedded.

Operate isn’t “we’ll fix it if it breaks.” It’s a working partnership with a continuous shipping cadence. Your AI gets sharper every month, not just maintained, and the same engineers who built it stay on the wheel.

OPS-01

Continuous feature shipping

New features land every week or two, not every quarter. Your AI improves visibly month over month. That’s the whole point of staying with us.

Weekly demos

OPS-02

Monitoring + on-call

Model latency, cost, error rate, and drift signals wired to alerts. Business-hours incident response; out-of-hours on-call on Heavy retainers.

Datadog · Langfuse · PagerDuty

OPS-03

Eval suite maintenance

The eval suite that gates every prompt change, model swap, and feature ship. New edge cases get tests before they get fixes.

Golden sets + regression

OPS-04

Cost & latency optimization

LLM bills sneak up. We tune prompts, route to cheaper models when quality holds, cache aggressively, and report the savings monthly.

Monthly savings reports

OPS-05

Slack-first cadence

We live in your Slack. No weekly status calls, no ticket ceremony. Async demos, async reviews. Synchronous time is reserved for things that need it.

Async-first

OPS-06

Eventual handoff prep

If the goal is in-housing this in 6–12 months, we work toward that: documentation, runbooks, and pair programming with your hires. We exit cleanly.

Optional path

Sec. 02 — How it works

A repeatable weekly rhythm. Demos every Friday.

No surprise sprints, no “where’s the team this week?” The same beat every week, so you always know what we’re shipping and why.

Monday — Roadmap

15-minute async planning thread

We post the week’s priorities in Slack with rationale. You react or push back; nothing starts without your eyes on it.

Tuesday to Thursday — Build

Heads-down shipping, mid-week pulse

PRs land continuously, with a brief Wednesday status note on what shipped and what’s at risk. Thursday is edge-case grinding, eval runs, and pressure-testing against the regression suite.

Friday — Demo + ship

Async demo, production deploys

A recorded demo of the week’s work, production deploys for everything green, and a monthly retro on the last Friday of each month.

Sec. 03 — What it costs

Three retainer sizes. Month-to-month.

Pick the capacity that matches your shipping pace. Scale up, scale down, or pause with 30 days’ notice. We’d rather lose a retainer than keep one we’re not earning.

OPE-01Light
~20 hrs/wk · monitoring and small features. Best for a stable system that needs a senior pair of hands a few days a week.from $8K/mo

OPE-02Standard
~40 hrs/wk · multi-feature pipeline · weekly demos · cost optimization. Best when you’re actively expanding what the AI does.from $18K/mo

OPE-03Heavy
~80 hrs/wk · dedicated 2-person team · out-of-hours on-call · architecture leadership. Best for mission-critical AI you can’t afford to let drift.from $35K/mo

30-day exit clause, no questions

Scale capacity up or down between months

Pause one month per year without losing your slot

Sec. 04 — Recent engagements

What “stay shipping” looks like.

Anonymized because the work was delivered under NDA. The numbers are real; we only publish metrics we can stand behind.

Industrial Distribution · Order platform

A zero-touch order pipeline that keeps running because someone runs it.

The order platform we built now runs as an operated system: supplier scrapers repaired as vendors change their sites, new suppliers added on request, and ~1,500 failed orders a month recovering automatically before customers notice.

Industrial MRO · Supplier automation

Supplier workflows that stay automated as vendors change.

Automation isn’t a one-time event when your vendors keep changing formats and portals. We maintain and extend the supplier automation so the client’s team never slides back to manual lookups.

Sec. 05 — Common questions

Things people actually ask.

Do we have to do Build with you first?

Most Operate clients come from a Build engagement, but no. We’ll take over an AI system someone else built if it’s in good shape. We start with a 1–2 week audit (priced separately) so we know exactly what we’re inheriting. Some audits end with “you’d be better off rebuilding,” and we say so when that’s true.

How fast can we cancel if it stops being valuable?

30 days’ notice. No penalty, no termination fee, no clawback. We hand back everything (code, runbooks, eval suites, prompts) in clean shape on the way out.

What if we want to in-house this eventually?

We’ll help. Some Operate engagements end with handoff to an in-house hire. We pair-program with your engineer, write transition docs, run knowledge sessions, and stay available for questions for 30 days after the formal end.

Can capacity scale up or down month-to-month?

Yes. Move between Light, Standard, and Heavy with 30 days’ notice. Need a temporary surge for a launch? We can add capacity for a single month. Once a year you can pause one month without losing your slot.

Do you provide an on-call SLA?

Light and Standard cover business-hours response (9–6 CT, under 2 hours on incidents). Heavy includes out-of-hours on-call with a 30-minute response SLA on Sev-1 incidents. We don’t pretend to offer 24/7 white-glove on an $8K retainer; pricing reflects coverage.

Do you take on AI systems other agencies built?

Sometimes, always after a paid 1–2 week audit so we know what we’re signing up for. If the codebase is healthy, we’ll happily take it on. If it’s not, we’ll tell you what it’d cost to rebuild and recommend who should do it, us or someone else.