For AI Products founders
Engineering for
AI Product Founders
Most AI MVPs in 2026 ship a thin wrapper around OpenAI with a prompt baked in. They demo well and fall apart when real users send queries the demo prompt didn't anticipate. Production AI is mostly the parts the demo doesn't show.
The AI feature landscape moves quarterly. Models that win in March lose in June. Founders who build with multi-provider routing from day one can adapt; founders locked to one provider are rebuilding.
Stack we use
Compliance
We won't ship features that send PII to third-party LLM providers without explicit data-handling controls. For regulated industries, we route via providers with zero-data-retention agreements.
Engagement
from $8,000
2–5 weeks
Why ai products builds are different
Same engagement model.
Industry-specific defaults.
We don't pretend a generic SaaS stack ships ai products at v1. The pain points below are what most builds in your industry get wrong on the first try — we wire them correctly from commit one.
The pain points
What breaks at v1 in ai products
Each of these is something we've watched founders get wrong on the first build. We ship the correct version on day one.
01
RAG done right vs naive cosine
Hybrid search + reranker + citation prompts + evals. We have a [whole post on this](/posts/rag-done-right-2026-hybrid-search-evals). Most teams skip layers 3–6 and ship the demo version.
02
Evals as a CI gate
Without evals you ship a 'better' model and quietly lose 20% accuracy. Held-out test set, CI gate, regression alerts. Day-one infrastructure, not 'later'.
03
Multi-provider routing day one
Anthropic primary, OpenAI fallback, Gemini for cost-sensitive paths. All via Vercel AI Gateway. Adding this later is a rewrite of every prompt-calling code path.
04
Cost-aware token budgets
Per-route budgets, caching, model tiering. Without these your inference bill is a function of how popular you are — which means the better you do, the worse the unit economics.
What we ship
Concretely,
by handoff.
The work you'd hand a salaried ai products engineer — done end to end on a flat-price engagement.
- Streaming chat or agent UI with proper UX (interrupt, retry, citations)
- Hybrid RAG: vector + lexical + reranker + citation-required prompts
- Evals harness in CI with held-out test set
- Multi-provider routing via Vercel AI Gateway
- Token budget and cost observability per route
AI Products work we've shipped
Real founders, real shipped product
The kind of build we do for ai products founders. Different industries, same flat-price model.
ArbVantage
Big-data platform for traffic arbitrage in Facebook ads. Built for affiliate media buyers running large daily spend across CPA offers — campaign and creative management, spend analytics, and high-volume ad-account orchestration.
Visit the product
OLSP System
All-in-one affiliate marketing platform with training, traffic tools, and pre-built funnels under a single tracking pixel. Members learn lead generation and earn commissions promoting OLSP's bundled digital products.
Visit the product
Campaign Refinery
Campaign Refinery is an advanced email marketing and automation platform that focuses on helping businesses send better emails, improve deliverability, and drive real engagement. It combines powerful automation, smart list management, and deep analytics to make email campaigns more effective and easier to manage.
Visit the productFAQ
Common ai products questions
Which model provider?
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How do you handle hallucinations?
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Can you do voice / multimodal?
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More questions on related topics
By city
AI Product Development for AI Product Founders
Same engagement scoped to your local market. Click the city for the full per-city economics and case studies.
Deeper reads
Long-form on our blog
Other industries
Different vertical?
For Fintech founders
Fintech Founders
Most agencies pitching fintech founders haven't shipped a real ledger.
Read the playbookFor Healthtech founders
Healthtech Founders
Healthtech MVPs split into two camps: ones that pretend HIPAA isn't a real constraint, and ones that treat compliance as the whole project.
Read the playbookFor B2B SaaS founders
B2B SaaS Founders
B2B SaaS MVPs that skip multi-tenant, SSO-ready architecture, and audit logging at v1 always pay the cost later — usually right when the first enterprise customer asks for them.
Read the playbookFor Marketplaces founders
Marketplace Founders
Marketplaces are full-stack products with two distinct user flows, payment routing, dispute resolution, search, and trust signals.
Read the playbookReady for your AI Products build?
Ship ai products in weeks, not quarters.
30-minute call, flat-price quote in 24 hours, first deploy inside two weeks.