Senior people, a fixed price, and software that ships into your real systems.
The four things every engagement is built on, the path from first email to handoff, and the questions people ask before they hire us.
Production, not proof of concept
Every build ships into your real systems with evals, monitoring and a runbook. A pilot that lives in a notebook is not a deliverable.
The people who scope it build it
No account manager, no discovery team handing a spec to a bench you never meet, and nobody learning on your budget.
Priced before we start
A written scope, a sequence, a timeline and a number that does not move. Published rates, no RFP, no six-month minimum.
Yours to keep
The code lives in your repository from the first commit. No licence, no hosting you keep paying us for, no lock-in either way.
Send us the problem. Get a scope and a fixed price.
You should not need a procurement department to buy a piece of software. No RFP, no six-month minimum, no partner you meet once and never see again.
A paragraph is enough. Use the form at the bottom of this page or write to us directly.
We work through what you are trying to change and whether building anything is the right answer. If we are not the right people for it, you hear that on this call rather than after an invoice.
A written scope, the sequence we would build it in, a timeline, and a number that does not move. Clear builds get this off the call. Several candidate processes, or one genuinely ambiguous one, start with the AI Opportunity Sprint.
In your stack, your repo, your conventions, with something working to look at every week. Tested, documented, and yours to own outright. Keep us on for what comes next or take it from here.
What does the AI Opportunity Sprint cost, and do we always need one?
$3,500 flat for one to two weeks, and no, you often do not need one. If what you want is clear enough to scope from a call and a look at your systems, you get the scope and the fixed price for free. The sprint is for a business with several candidate processes and no clear first one, for work that is genuinely ambiguous, or where the honest answer to "should we build this at all" is not yet obvious. If you go ahead with a build, the fee comes off the price. If you do not, the plan is yours to take anywhere.
What does a build cost?
Most first builds land between $15,000 and $40,000, fixed, and take three to six weeks. A small, well-understood automation can be less. Something that is really several builds gets split into phases, each priced on its own, so you can stop after any of them. Embedded work is $8,000 a week with a four-week minimum. The number you agree is the number you pay; model usage and hosting run in your own accounts at cost.
What size of business is a good fit?
An operating business or product team that has real manual work and no AI team of its own. That is usually somewhere between twenty and a few hundred people, but the test is simpler: if someone on your team spends their week on work a careful reader with the right access could do, it is probably a fit.
What is not a fit?
Work that genuinely needs a team of five for a year. Pure strategy with no intention to build anything. Anything requiring a security clearance or full-time on-site presence. And projects where the real problem is organizational rather than technical, because software will not fix that and we would rather say so than take the money.
Can you work in our existing codebase, alongside our engineers?
Yes, and that is the usual arrangement. We work in your repo, follow your conventions, go through your review process, and ship through your pipeline. Your engineers keep owning what they own. We are there to take one thing off the list, not to reorganize how your team works.
Who owns the code?
You do, outright, from the first commit. It lives in your repository. There is no license, no hosting you have to keep buying from us, and nothing that stops working if we stop working together.
What happens if the scope changes halfway through?
Small changes are absorbed, because a fixed price that falls apart the first time reality intervenes is not really a fixed price. Something that genuinely changes the shape of the work gets discussed openly before anyone does anything, with a revised number you can say no to. What will not happen is a surprise invoice at the end.
How quickly can you start, and how do you handle our data?
Usually within one to two weeks of agreeing a scope. On data: we work under your NDA, use the least access that lets the work happen, and prefer test or anonymized data anywhere it will do. If your business has particular constraints, raise them on the first call and we will tell you honestly whether we can meet them.
How big is the team?
Deliberately small and entirely senior. The people who scope your build are the people who write it. When a build needs a specialist we do not cover, we bring in engineers we have shipped with before and we tell you we are doing it. Where a job genuinely needs a standing team of five, we will say that on the first call.
A small, senior practice. We have run the business and written the code, so we build like the outcome is ours.
Productsmith is led by Taylor Smith, after ten years building product at AirDNA, CoStar, Expedia and Turno and shipping HostReady from zero to production. We keep the team small and senior, and bring in engineers we have shipped with before when a build needs a specialist. No account managers, no bench, no ramp-up you pay for.
Have something in this shape on your list?
Send us a paragraph. You get a straight read on what it would take, and a fixed price if it is worth building.