Engagement
Three ways in. No long contract at any of them.
Start where the risk is lowest. Each stage is designed to be worth doing on its own, so you are never buying the next one on faith.
Audit
Freeone week
A written assessment of your site, your stack and the flow between them — findings, priorities and what a fix is actually worth.
- Technical and commercial review of the current system
- Ranked findings with estimated revenue impact
- Integration, data-quality and security assessment
- Scope and cost range for the work worth doing
- Yours to keep, whether or not you hire us
Best whenYou suspect something is leaking and want it named.
Build
Fixed scope, fixed priceproject
A defined build with a defined price — platform, storefront, app, integration or migration — delivered in weekly increments against a proven slice.
- Discovery, architecture and a costed plan
- A working production slice inside two weeks
- Weekly deployed increments on staging you can watch
- Migration, cutover and rollback plan
- Documentation, decision log and handover
- 30 days of post-launch support included
Best whenThere is a specific system that needs to exist.
Operate
Retained capacitymonthly, cancel on a month's notice
Ongoing engineering, automation, security and growth against a monthly retainer — sized to the estate it looks after rather than to a tier you have to fit.
- Continuous development and maintenance
- Automation estate — monitoring, digests, escalation
- Dependency, access and infrastructure review on a schedule
- Search, content and lifecycle marketing execution
- Infrastructure operation and cost management
- Reporting on what shipped and what it moved
- Priority response ahead of project queue
Best whenIt is built. Now it has to keep running and keep growing.
Programmes
Three shapes of work.
The engagements above are how we work together. These are what we build. Each one is scoped and priced from the audit, in writing, before you commit to anything — and each includes a security review, because it is cheap now and expensive later.
Operating System
One platform that holds the operation — quoting, jobs, inventory, scheduling, billing — with the books balancing underneath it instead of beside it.
For you whenThe business runs on spreadsheets, email threads and one person's memory.
- Domain model and schema designed before a screen is drawn
- Operational platform — quoting, job costing, inventory, scheduling
- Double-entry accounting where every document posts a balanced journal
- Role-based access modelled in the schema and enforced server-side
- Migration off the spreadsheets, with the history intact
- Security review of authentication, authorisation and tenancy
- Documentation and a decision log you could hand to another team
ReplacesA spreadsheet estate, three SaaS tools that disagree, and the re-keying between them.
Scope thisCommerce Engine
Ecommerce where pricing is a calculation rather than a number in a field — supplier feeds, coverage maths, freight and trade tiers — with the demand layer that feeds it.
For you whenThe catalogue is the hard part, and the storefront cannot express it.
- Catalogue engineering — ingestion, normalisation, deduplication, media
- Pricing engine: rollups, coverage, waste factors, trade tiers, margin logic
- Checkout, tax, real-time freight and financing
- Replatform with legacy URLs mapped rather than abandoned
- Search, content and lifecycle marketing against the catalogue
- Security review of checkout, accounts and payment paths
- Analytics that measure the funnel without harvesting your customers
ReplacesA platform you have outgrown, and a rewrite you are afraid will lose the rankings.
Scope thisAutonomous Estate
Automation and scoped agents that carry the repetitive work end to end, with approval gates where judgement belongs and an audit trail for everything they touch.
For you whenThe process works, but only because somebody does it by hand every day.
- Process mapping — what to automate, what to leave alone, and why
- Generative pipelines with human approval gates at the decisions that matter
- Agents with scoped tool access and a full audit trail
- Classification, extraction and retrieval over your own documents
- Monitoring, failure digests and escalation that reaches a person
- Least-privilege service accounts and secrets in a managed store
- A written account of what runs, what it costs and how to stop it
ReplacesThe manual routine nobody has time to document, and the errors it produces at volume.
Scope thisRun the numbers
What the manual version costs you
Your numbers in, arithmetic out. There is no 'typical savings' figure hidden in here — we don't know your business yet, and a percentage we made up would not help you.
Annual cost of the manual process
$46,800
CAD · hours × people × hourly cost × 52
- What a build could cost and still pay back inside 12 monthsequals the annual cost — if the system removed the process entirely
- $46,800
- …if it only removed halfannual cost ÷ 2
- $23,400
This is arithmetic on the numbers you typed, nothing more. It does not know your margins, your seasonality, or whether the process can be automated at all. The audit is where those questions get answered — for free, in writing.
The loaded hourly cost is set to $45 an hour — an assumption, not a measurement. Change it above and every figure here changes with it.
Take these numbers to the auditPer person. Count the re-keying, chasing, checking and reporting — not just the obvious part.
Everyone who touches the process in a normal week.
An assumption, not a statistic. $45 is a placeholder for salary plus payroll burden, benefits and overhead — replace it with your own figure.
Optional. Enquiries that went cold because nobody replied in time. Leave at zero if you don't track it.
Optional. Average first-order or first-contract value. Revenue, not profit — we keep it separate for that reason.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
What does this actually cost?
The audit is free, and it ends in a written scope with a cost range — so the first number you see is one we can stand behind rather than one invented on a call. Builds are fixed scope at a fixed price. Retainers are sized to the estate they look after, monthly, with no setup fee and a month's notice to end. If the honest answer is that the work isn't worth doing at your volume, the audit says that too.
We already have an agency.
Keep them, if the work they do is working. We are usually brought in for the layer underneath — the storefront, the integrations, the process nobody has automated. The audit will name what belongs to them and what doesn't, and we don't take over marketing that is performing just to take over marketing.
Won't AI make all of this unnecessary?
We use it heavily, and it has made building cheaper — which is why a fixed-scope build is affordable for a business your size at all. What it has not done is design your data model, reconcile your supplier feeds, or decide where a human approval belongs. That is the work. The models are a tool in it.
How long until something actually works?
Findings within a week of the first call. The first production slice inside two weeks of a build starting — real, narrow, with your data. After that, weekly releases on staging you can open yourself. Build slots depend on the queue and we will tell you the real date, not the comfortable one.
What happens if we stop working with you?
Nothing moves and nothing breaks. The code is in your repositories, the infrastructure is on your accounts, the documentation and decision log were delivered as part of the build. Retainers end with a month's notice. We would rather earn the next month than lock you into it.
We're probably too small for this.
Possibly, and we will say so. If the whole thing is a brochure site, you don't need a studio. The work starts to pay when there is a process with enough volume or enough manual handling that automating it covers its own cost — the audit is the cheapest way to find out which side of that line you are on.
You run your own businesses. Will we actually get your attention?
Eleven businesses run on the systems described on this site, and that is the point — the architecture, the automation estate and the runbooks exist because we depend on them daily. Retainer clients sit ahead of the project queue by design. What we won't do is promise a start date we can't hold to win the work.
Someone else built our system. Can you take it over?
Often, yes — a large share of what we do. The audit determines whether the existing system is worth continuing or whether replacing it piece by piece is cheaper over eighteen months. We will tell you which, including when the answer is not the one that bills more.
Do you work with businesses outside Ontario?
Yes. We are based in Ontario and most clients are Canadian, but the work is remote and we have built for operators elsewhere. Contracts are in CAD unless you ask otherwise.
Who owns the code?
You do, without qualification. Work happens in your repositories and your infrastructure accounts wherever possible. There is no licence to renew and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us.
What does the AI part actually mean?
Concretely: generative pipelines with approval gates, agents with scoped tool access and audit trails, classification and extraction over documents, and retrieval over your own content. It does not mean a chat bubble on your homepage, unless that is genuinely what you need.
Is the security work a separate engagement?
It is included in every programme, because it is cheap to do while a system is being designed and expensive to retrofit afterwards. We also review systems we did not build — that is usually an audit first, since the finding is often that the risk is somewhere other than where it was expected.