StoAI

About

Production AI. Not production theater.

We're a specialized AI engineering consultancy that helps SaaS companies ship real AI features — the kind that survive production traffic, stay within budget, and don't page your team at 3 AM.

Origin

Why this company exists.

I spent years building distributed systems — the kind where reliability isn't a nice-to-have, it's the entire job. Systems where a poorly handled failure mode means real revenue lost. Where "it works on my machine" is a career-ending statement.

When every software company suddenly needed AI capabilities, I watched the same patterns repeat: teams prototyping with LLMs, getting excited, shipping something half-baked, and then spending the next six months fighting production fires they didn't know were possible.

The problem wasn't the AI. The AI works.

The problem was the engineering around the AI.

  • No fallback for when the model times out.
  • No monitoring for when outputs degrade silently.
  • No cost controls for when usage grows 10x.
  • No evaluation framework for when "it seems to work" isn't enough.

I started this consultancy because SaaS companies deserve AI features built with the same rigor as the rest of their production systems. Not a prototype wrapped in hope. A production system backed by engineering discipline.

Different by design

Five things you won't get from a typical AI agency.

01

The person who scopes the project builds the project.

There's no sales team. No project managers. No handoff to a junior developer you've never met. You talk to me, I scope the work, I build it, I hand it off. One person accountable from start to finish.

02

We ship into your codebase, not ours.

Every line of code goes through your PR process, in your repository, deployed in your infrastructure. When we leave, you own everything. No vendor lock-in. No proprietary platform you need us to maintain.

03

Production hardening is not an add-on.

Monitoring, fallbacks, cost controls, and documentation are standard on every engagement. This is not the premium tier. This is the baseline.

04

We tell you when AI is the wrong answer.

If your problem is better solved with a rules engine, a SQL query, or a well-designed UX, we'll tell you. We've walked away from projects where AI wasn't the right fit.

05

Fixed scope, fixed price, before work begins.

We don't bill by the hour. We don't send vague proposals with ranges. You get a written scope document with exact deliverables and a fixed price. Sign off before we start. No surprises.

Background

Technical credentials.

Distributed systems architecture

Built and operated systems handling millions of requests per day.

Reliability engineering

Reduced production incidents by designing systems that degrade gracefully.

Integration architecture

Connected complex multi-service environments where every boundary is a failure point.

AI product development

Shipped AI-powered features in production SaaS products, not just prototypes.

Languages: Java, Python, Node.js, Go
AI: OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, open-source
Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure

Philosophy

Principles, not just process.

Simple until proven otherwise.

Direct SDK calls over heavy frameworks. PostgreSQL with pgvector over a dedicated vector database — unless you actually need one. Fewer moving parts means fewer things that break.

Observable from day one.

If we can't measure it, we don't ship it. Every AI integration gets monitoring for latency, cost, error rate, and output quality before it goes to production.

Your team should be able to maintain this without us.

If your engineers can't understand, modify, and extend what we built, we failed. Clear code, thorough documentation, and a recorded handoff session are non-negotiable.

Honest scoping over optimistic scoping.

If something will take 5 weeks, we say 5 weeks. We don't quote 3 and ask for extensions. Our timelines are based on experience, not on what you want to hear.

Ready to talk?

30-minute conversation. No sales pitch. Just a technical discussion about what you're trying to build and whether we're the right fit.