POC to Production
Everything works until you're out of office.
You didn't want to pay someone to prompt Claude on your behalf, so you built the prototype. Got the buy-in. Now what?
We take messy POCs to production. AI agents, MCP servers, data warehouses, internal apps. The first milestone is free: we get it off the laptop and into your cloud before you've spent a dollar.
The Production Teardown
An engineer takes your POC apart and hands you a fixed price and a date we'll guarantee.
You leave with
- A kill list: what to throw away, not just what to fix
- A fixed price, not a range
- A ship date we go on the hook for
- A budget memo your CFO will actually accept
Learn nothing new and you don't pay.
2 remaining for August
Before any of that: we deploy your POC into your cloud, behind your SSO, free. Four claims a month, and claiming takes five minutes.
The whole path
Here's every step.
You can stop after any of them. Nothing costs you money until step four.
- 01Free5 minutes
Claim the milestone
A work email and what the POC does. That is the entire form; everything else comes out in the kickoff.
- 02Free30 minutes
Kickoff
Repo access, cloud account, login provider. You're on with the engineer doing the deploy, and you can interrogate them at will.
- 03Free~2 weeks
The First Deploy
Your POC deployed in your cloud, behind your SSO, config in your repo. Yours to keep, whatever you decide next.
- 04$5,0001 week
The Teardown
Now that it runs somewhere real, the remaining gap is visible. The Teardown prices it: a kill list, a fixed price, and a launch date we guarantee. Credited if you hire us.
- 05CreditedYour guaranteed date
The build
Live by the date the Teardown set, or we keep working and stop billing. The $5,000 comes off the price.
So how long does the build take?
It depends on what you built. Our two most recent POC-to-production builds:
90 days
A customer-facing application
More surface, more failure modes, more people who notice when it breaks.
30 days
An internal application
Fewer users, a friendlier blast radius, and a shorter road to live.
Yours will be its own number. The Teardown is where it stops being a guess and becomes the date we're on the hook for.
Most POCs die in the same few places.
None of this is a knock on whoever built it. A POC is supposed to cut corners. The trouble starts when the demo goes well enough that someone with a budget calls it basically done.
The last ten percent isn't ten percent. It's the schema that doesn't match, the retry when an API times out, the alert that fires before the customer notices, the access controls. The engineering that doesn't demo well, which is why it never made the demo.
“The demo went well. Someone with a budget called it basically done. It is not basically done.”
“It trained on a snapshot that stopped refreshing in March.”
“If the API times out at 2am it loses state, and we find out on Monday.”
“The API key is hardcoded in cell four of a notebook nobody is allowed to rerun.”
“Legal is going to ask whether we are sending customer contracts to a model provider.”
“Regular software fails loudly. This thing fails convincingly.”
“Nobody has volunteered to run it after it ships. Not really.”
“I cannot ask for budget without a number, and I cannot get a number without spending budget.”
You're not imagining the pattern. In S&P Global's 2025 survey of around a thousand companies, the average organization scrapped 46% of its AI proofs of concept before they ever reached production. The work is making it boring: a system that runs the same on a Tuesday in November as it did the afternoon you showed it off, and keeps running once the person who built it has moved on.
The free milestone
The first milestone is free.
We call it the First Deploy. Your POC lives on somebody's laptop, or in a notebook, or on a cron job under a desk. We move it into your cloud account, put it behind your company login, take the secrets out of the code, and hand you the keys. The first milestone of any production build, done by the engineers who would do the rest of it, at no charge.
Free · 5 minutes
You claim it.
A work email and a few sentences on what the POC does. That is the whole form. Everything else comes out in the kickoff.
Free · 30 minutes
Kickoff with the engineer.
Thirty minutes with the engineer doing the deploy. The agenda is logistics: repo access, which cloud account, which login provider.
Free · Typically 2 weeks
Your POC, running somewhere real.
Deployed in your cloud behind your SSO, secrets in a secrets manager, the deploy config committed to your repo, and a one page handoff note. If your laptop closes, the POC no longer cares.
The milestone includes
- One POC: a single app or service, plus the datastore it leans on, containerized.
- Deployed to one environment in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account. Yours, not ours.
- Behind your identity provider: Google, Okta, or Entra. Basic auth if you have none.
- Secrets out of the code and into your platform's secrets manager.
- The deploy configuration committed to your repo, with a one page handoff note.
It deliberately doesn't
- Monitoring, alerting, evals, retries, CI. That gap is what the Teardown prices.
- Data migration, retraining, or rewrites. We deploy what exists.
- Multi-service architectures and on-prem. Those need the Teardown first.
- Compliance or security review.
- If it can't be deployed as-is, you get the reasons in writing. Still worth having.
Four a month.
2 remaining for August
One senior engineer runs each First Deploy. When the month's four are claimed, we say so straight away, and you get first claim on next month's slots.
Claim this month's milestoneYour options
Every option, priced honestly.
Your cloud vendor
Free
AWS, Databricks and Snowflake will all review your architecture at no charge. We are partners with three of them and we think their engineers are good.
The catch
A review funded by a platform will never conclude that you should buy less of that platform, and it will never tell you to throw something away. It ends in a document.
A big systems integrator
Undisclosed
Accenture, Cognizant, McKinsey and the rest all sell a POC-to-production offer. They have thousands of engineers and they are not bluffing about that.
The catch
You will not get a price before a discovery phase, you will not meet the people who do the work until after you sign, and the quarter will be over.
Us
Free to start
The first milestone is free: your POC deployed in your cloud, behind your SSO. Then the $5,000 Teardown prices the rest, with a fixed price and a date attached, credited in full if you hire us.
The catch
Four free milestones a month, four builds at a time, so we cannot take everyone. And if the honest answer is that your POC should be rebuilt, that is what we will say.
We're a partner to three of the platforms above and we'd recommend taking their free review. We're just the only ones in this list whose free work lands in your repo, behind your login.
What $5,000 buys
Six documents.
Days, not weeks. Run by Jay Modi, our CTO, who you'll have met before you spend anything.
The kill list
What should be thrown away instead of hardened, and why. Only an engineer with nothing else to sell you will write this list.
The ship date
A date we will guarantee in the build. Not an estimate, not a planning assumption. The date we go on the hook for.
The fixed price
One number and the scope it buys. If you hire us, the $5,000 comes off it.
The 2am report
Every way it breaks when nobody is watching, ranked by how likely it is to happen before anyone notices.
The budget memo
A one-page case for the spend, written in language your CFO will accept, that you can forward without editing it first. Your next problem is not engineering. It is getting this funded.
The owner question, answered
Who runs this once we leave, what they need to know, and what it costs to keep alive. The failure mode nobody scopes and everybody hits.
Who takes it apart
Jay Modi
Chief Technology Officer, Aptologics
Jay has spent about a decade on the unglamorous half of software. Look at what he was actually hired to do at each stop and the same three words keep coming back: reliability, service-level agreements, distributed systems. That is also the entire subject of this page.
Before Aptologics he was a backend and technical lead at WotNot, an AI chatbot platform, where a model had to keep answering correctly on a Tuesday afternoon whether or not anyone was watching it. He's been shipping Python into production since 2014.
He runs the Teardown himself. Not an account manager, not a pod assembled after you sign. The person who reads your POC is the person who writes the number down, and he's the one who has to live with the date. If he thinks your POC should be rebuilt rather than hardened, he'll say so.
The risk is ours
Two guarantees.
On the Teardown
“Nothing you didn't know”
If the Teardown does not tell you something you did not already know about your own POC, you do not pay for it. No form to fill in, no argument to have.
On the build
“Still running in November”
It is live in production by the date the Teardown set, or we keep working until it is and we stop billing.
We run four builds at a time and four free First Deploys a month. When they're full there's a queue, and the Teardown is how you join it.
We harden it on the platforms your data already runs on
Send us the POC if
- There is a working POC. Somebody built it and it does the thing, at least on a good day.
- It runs today. Ugly is fine, running is required; the First Deploy needs something to deploy.
- Somebody with a budget has already been impressed by it.
- You need it running in production, and you would rather it not page you at 2am forever.
- You would like to know the price before the meeting where you have to defend the price.
Save yourself the form if
- There is no POC yet. Start with the idea, not with us.
- You want a body-shop contractor to sit in your standups indefinitely.
- You want someone to agree that it is basically done. We will not.
Claim it, free
Tell us about your POC.
2 remaining for August
Tell us what the POC does the way you'd tell another engineer. Rough is fine. That and a work email is the whole form; the stack, the cloud account, and the access questions belong to the kickoff, after you've claimed your milestone.
Claims get a kickoff invitation by email within a couple of business days. If the month's four deploys are already taken, we say so straight away, and you get first claim on next month's slots. No automated sequence afterwards.
POC to Production FAQ
The questions worth asking before you send anything over
Three things: access to the repo, a cloud account we can deploy into, and half an hour from whoever owns your identity provider. If getting those three is politically impossible at your company, that is worth learning now, because a paid build would hit the same wall on day one.
From demo to dependable
You built the proof. Let's build the part that lasts.
Claim the free First Deploy and your POC runs in your cloud, behind your SSO, typically within two weeks of kickoff. Five minutes to claim, four claims a month, and yours to keep whatever you decide next.
