We sit on your side of the table — no agency to upsell, no vendor kickbacks, no padded estimates. A senior engineer runs the discovery, the architecture calls and the review personally. The fleet does the reading and the drafting underneath. What you get back is the call, in writing, with the reasoning attached.
- Independent
- No reseller margin, no referral fees, and no vendor we quietly benefit from you choosing.
- Fixed price
- Agreed before the engagement starts. If it runs long, that comes out of our margin, not your invoice.
- Written down
- Reports, ADRs and risk memos you can forward to a board — not a deck we present once and take home.
The fleet reads. The senior engineer decides.
Mechanical work compresses enormously with agents. Judgement doesn't compress at all — so we don't pretend it does, and we don't bill you as though it did.
- Every conversation with your stakeholders
- The architecture calls, and the trade-offs behind them
- Every recommendation, re-derived before it gets written
- Sign-off — nothing reaches you unreviewed
- Reading the codebase end to end instead of sampling it
- Dependency, contract and integration inventory
- First drafts of diagrams, ADRs and the risk register
- Cross-checking every claim in the report against the code
The order never reverses. An agent has never sent you a recommendation.
Four shapes. Each priced flat.
Every one of these is scoped on a call and quoted as a single number before it starts.
- 01
Pre-project audit
Before you commit budget, we read the spec, talk to your stakeholders, and write down what the work actually requires — scope, risk, a realistic timeline, and the parts nobody has costed yet.
You get- 5–15 page written report
- Readout call
- Follow-up Q&A
- 02
Vendor proposal review
You have a quote from an agency. We tell you which line items are padded, which ones are missing, and where the contract will hurt you in month nine.
You get- Annotated proposal
- Counter-offer template
- Risk memo
- 03
Architecture validation
Greenfield or rebuild. We pressure-test the proposed stack, draw the architecture as it will actually be, and record the trade-offs as ADRs your team can argue with a year from now.
You get- Architecture diagram
- ADR pack
- Workshop with your team
- 04
Fractional CTO
Ongoing senior judgement for a leadership team without a full-time CTO. Set hours per month, and your engineers reach us directly instead of routing everything through you.
You get- Weekly written update
- Direct Slack and email access
- Bi-weekly leadership call
Saying no is most of the value.
An advisor who agrees with everything is an expensive mirror. The first one below is the refusal our own delivery model has to make; the other four are the technology arguments we have most often — and we'll have them on your project too.
Agent output that nobody read
We run a fleet of agents, and that is exactly why this is the first thing we refuse. Generated code clears five gates and a senior engineer's read before it reaches your repository — no exceptions, and no "it's only a small change". If a vendor is selling you AI-accelerated delivery without telling you who reviews it, that is the question to ask them.
Microservices for a team of five
You will spend more on infrastructure than on features, and every bug becomes a distributed-systems problem. Modular monolith first; extract a service when you have evidence, not a diagram.
A bespoke design system on day one
Use shadcn/ui or Radix. Build your own once you have three products that need to look like siblings — not before you have one that works.
GraphQL because it's modern
REST with real types covers almost everything. GraphQL earns its place when you have many clients and a genuine federated-graph problem, and it charges rent every day until then.
Rolling your own auth
Use Clerk, WorkOS or Auth.js. Hand-built session handling is a CVE with a deadline on it, and it is never the thing your product competes on.
30 minutes. No agenda. No pitch.
Bring a quote, a spec, or a system nobody can explain. We'll be useful, or we'll tell you who would be.