AI Product Development · New York

AI Product Development
in New York

LLM features that actually ship to users.

We ship AI features for founders in New York — chat interfaces, RAG over your data, agents that do work, evaluations that tell you when the model is broken. Production-ready LLM apps, not demos. We use Vercel AI SDK, AI Gateway for model routing, and the eval tools that work in 2026.

Get a AI Product Development quote New York overview

Engagement shape

From

$8,000

Flat price, quoted after 30-min call

Timeline

2–5 weeks

First production deploy

1

Senior engineer, named

Day 1

Code in your GitHub

$0

Retainer, equity, lock-in

How this works

One AI-native engineer.
The output of a team.

One senior engineer plus AI agents now ships ai product development that used to need a four-person team. Same code quality, half the cost, three-week timelines instead of three months. Built for pre-seed to Series A founders in New York who need to ship before the next round closes.

The local read

Why ai product development is hard in New York

NYC founders have a worse hiring problem than the funding headlines suggest. Half your top engineering candidates are weighing your seed offer against a $400K Google package. The dev shops in town are agency-of-record operations billing hourly, or staffing shops shoveling juniors into your team.

We're neither. One named senior engineer owns the build end-to-end. Flat price quoted after a 30-minute call. Eastern Time, same as your General Catalyst partner and your midtown customers. When we finish, the code is in your GitHub and the contract is over. No retainer.

Hiring one senior engineer here is a ~$310K year-one outlay and a 60–90 day search. Our ai product development engagement starts at $8,000 with a first deploy in 2–5 weeks.

Did you know · New York

NYC has roughly 25,000 active tech startups, second only to the Bay Area in the US.

Time zone

--:--:--

ET

Eastern Time, same as you. Meetings happen during your morning coffee, not midnight Slack pings.

Sectors in New York

FintechAI infrastructureMedia techB2B SaaSConsumer tech

Stack we use

Vercel AI SDKAI GatewayAnthropic / OpenAI / GeminiPostgres + pgvectorInngest / Workflow DevKit

What you actually get

Concrete deliverables.
Live in 2–5 weeks.

No discovery phase that bills for itself. No Figma-only delivery. Every item below is something you can open, click, and ship to a user.

01

Streaming chat or agent UI with proper UX (interrupt, retry, citations)

02

RAG pipeline over your data — chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, citations

03

Provider routing via Vercel AI Gateway — Anthropic primary, OpenAI/Gemini fallback

04

Evals: a real test set, a deterministic CI check that catches model regressions

05

Observability: tool-call traces, token spend, latency per provider

Why us

Why founders in New York pick us for this

01

We ship LLM features weekly — eval-first workflow, not 'ship and hope'

02

Model-routing day one so you're not locked to one provider's pricing or outages

03

RAG done with hybrid search + reranking, not naive embedding cosine similarity

04

Cost-aware: caching, model tiering (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus), budget alerts wired in

AI Product Development we've shipped

Founders we shipped ai product development with

Real founders, real product, real testimonials. The kind of ai product development work we'd do for you in New York.

Content Platform · 2022

Sweet and Savory Meals

Homemade recipes blog and e-commerce platform for food lovers. Easy and delicious dishes with integrated recipe management and shopping features.

Visit the product

“When we started, there was no website, no technical foundation, just an idea and a clear vision of what I wanted to build. Valery and the Start Matter team took that vision seriously and helped me turn it into a real product from scratch. What I appreciated most was how easy and human the collaboration felt. They listened carefully, explained things in a way I could understand, and genuinely cared about building something that would work long-term, not just "finish a task." I always felt supported and involved in the process. Start Matter handled everything end to end and made the whole journey smooth and stress-free. Today, Sweet and Savory Meals is live, growing, and built on a solid foundation I trust. I’m truly grateful for their work, their patience, and their commitment, and I would happily recommend Start Matter to anyone looking for a reliable and thoughtful development partner.”

Catalina Castravet

Founder, Sweet and Savory Meals

Health Platform · 2023

Brain.fm

Music platform designed to help focus, relax, and sleep better. AI-generated music optimized for cognitive performance and mental wellness.

Visit the product

“Working with Start Matter has been a fantastic experience. When we brought Start Matter into the Brain.fm project, we were looking for more than just developers — we needed a team that could think with us, help shape the product, and execute at a high level. Start Matter did exactly that and more. From early iterations to complex feature development, the team showed deep technical expertise, strong problem-solving skills, and a clear focus on delivering value. Communication was always open and honest, and they were great about adapting to changes and challenges without missing a beat. What really stood out was their ability to integrate seamlessly with our internal team and match our pace. They consistently delivered high-quality work and made sure we felt supported at every step. I'm very grateful for their professionalism, creativity, and commitment to excellence. I would highly recommend Start Matter to anyone who wants a reliable, skilled, and thoughtful development partner.”

Daniel Clark

Co-founder, Brain.fm

Deeper reads

More on ai product development from our blog

Same engagement model, written up long-form — pricing tiers, workflows, anti-patterns.

2026-05-09·11 mins

How We Use Claude Code in Production: Workflows, Costs, Anti-Patterns

30+ production builds with Claude Code as primary tool. What works, what gets people in trouble, exact prompt patterns, monthly bill.

Read on the blog

2026-04-21·6 mins

Why We Don't Take Equity (And What We Take Instead)

About one in five founders ask. We always say no. The reasoning isn't about the cap table — it's about what equity does to incentives on a flat-price engagement.

Read on the blog

2026-04-09·12 mins

RAG Done Right in 2026: Hybrid Search, Reranking, Evals

Most RAG implementations in 2026 still ship naive embedding-cosine retrieval. They work for the demo and break for users. Here's the current production bar.

Read on the blog

FAQ

Common questions about ai product development
in New York

How fast can you start?

+

Most builds begin within seven days of the first call. We don't sell discovery — we go from problem statement to first deploy on the same day-one timeline.

Is the price really flat?

+

Yes. After a 30-minute call we send a single number and a scope you can accept or reject. No hourly billing, no change-order games. If we underestimate, we eat it.

Which AI provider do you use?

+

Default to Anthropic Claude (Sonnet for most cases, Haiku for cost-sensitive paths, Opus for the hard ones). All routed via Vercel AI Gateway so you can switch providers without code changes.

How do you handle hallucinations?

+

Evals on a held-out test set in CI, citation-required prompts where factuality matters, structured outputs (JSON schema) where the answer must be machine-parsable. Where users see free-form responses, we add 'why this answer' citations to the underlying data.

Who owns the code?

+

You do, from commit one. The repository is created in your GitHub org. Infrastructure is provisioned in your cloud account. We don't host your stack on ours and we don't lock you in.

More questions → /faq/ai · /faq/tech · /faq/cost

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