Questions, answered honestly.

Probably by one of three things: the scope grew until the price stopped making sense, the person disappeared, or you ended up with something you couldn’t touch without them. I work against all three specifically. Scope and price are fixed in writing before I start. Every build ends with documentation and a handoff walkthrough. And everything runs on your accounts, so nothing is hostage to me still answering the phone.

I can’t prove I’m different in advance. What I can do is make the first step cheap enough that finding out doesn’t cost you much.

Fair question, and the honest answer is that I’m one person, so this is a real risk you’re taking. Here’s how I lower it: the system runs on your infrastructure, the code is in your repository, and the runbook (a plain-English page saying what the system does, how to turn it off, and what to check when something looks wrong) is written well enough that another engineer can pick it up. My goal at the end of a build is that you don’t need me. The retainer is a convenience, not a dependency.

If you want, I’ll put you in touch with the person I’d recommend if I weren’t available.

No. You need to know your business well enough to tell me what’s slow and what’s broken. I’ll do the translating. If a conversation with me requires you to learn what an API is, I’ve explained it badly.

Not without a person clicking approve. That’s the default in everything I build: the system can draft, sort, look things up, and prepare an action, but a person releases anything that leaves your business or can’t be undone.

Some workflows are safe to run fully unattended: moving a file, updating an internal record, sending you an alert. We’ll decide which ones together, and we start conservative.

You do, all three. I build inside your accounts using credentials you control and can revoke. The code lives in a repository you own. There’s no platform of mine you’re renting, and no license that expires.

No. Where a workflow calls an AI provider, I’ll name the provider and tell you exactly what data it sees before we build anything, and I use the settings that exclude your data from training. If a workflow would require sending something you’re not comfortable sending, we find another way or we don’t build it.

The workflow audit is $750, and it comes off the price if you go ahead with a build. A scoped build is $2,000 to $10,000, quoted as a fixed price before I start. If it takes longer than I estimated, that’s my problem, not your invoice. The retainer is $500 to $2,000 a month, month to month, cancel whenever.

There’s no long-term contract, because a contract that keeps you when you’d rather leave isn’t worth the trouble it causes.

A scoped build is one to four weeks. Most first projects land near the short end, because the first one should be small on purpose: something with a clear finish line, so you can see how I work before you decide whether to hand me anything bigger.

It will. That’s what the retainer is for, and it’s also why I document things: a change should be an afternoon, not a rebuild. If you’re not on a retainer, small changes are billed as they come, and you’re free to have someone else make them.

I don’t know yet, and I’d rather find out than sell you something that doesn’t fit. Write to me with what’s eating the most time and I’ll tell you straight; if it’s worth talking through, we’ll talk. The pattern that works best is repetitive work with clear rules that a person is doing by hand: data moving between systems, requests getting sorted and routed, reports getting assembled. The pattern that works worst is judgment-heavy work where the rules live in someone’s instinct and change case by case.

If you’re in the second category, I’ll say so.