DarCode is booking new AI engineering engagements for Q4

Engagements

How Working With Us Is Structured

We are a studio, not a platform, so there is no seat count and no usage tier. Engagements are scoped, quoted, and fixed before anyone starts building.

Models

Four Ways To Start

Most clients begin with a discovery sprint and decide from there. Nothing obliges you to continue.

Most common

Discovery Sprint

Fixed fee2 weeks

The cheapest way to find out whether the thing you want is worth building.

  • Problem framing and success criteria
  • Benchmark defined and baselined
  • Architecture and build plan
  • Costed delivery estimate
  • Written report you keep either way
Scope a sprint
Most common

Project Build

Fixed fee per phase6 to 16 weeks

A defined system, delivered to production, with the source and infrastructure handed to you.

  • Everything in a discovery sprint
  • Full implementation to production
  • Evaluation suite and CI gates
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Runbooks and team handover
  • Post-launch support window
Discuss a build
Most common

Embedded Team

RetainerMonthly

Senior engineers working inside your team, on your board, to your standards.

  • One to three senior engineers
  • Working in your repo and rituals
  • Engineering standards set and documented
  • Knowledge transfer as a deliverable
  • Scale up or down each month
Talk about capacity
Most common

Advisory

Fractional retainerOngoing

A senior technical voice in the room for the decisions that are expensive to reverse.

  • Architecture and design review
  • Model and vendor selection
  • Hiring and team structure input
  • Standing office hours
  • No commission on any tool we suggest
Ask about advisory

Every engagement is quoted after a scoping call. We do not publish a rate card because the number depends entirely on what you are building.

Commercials

How We Price, And Why

Four commitments that apply to every engagement regardless of size.

Fixed fee, not day rate

You get a number before work starts. If we scoped it badly, that is our problem to absorb, not yours.

Phased commitment

Longer builds are split into phases with a decision point at each boundary. You can stop at any of them.

No lock-in

Source, infrastructure, and documentation transfer at handover. Nothing we build needs us to keep running.

No commission

We take no referral fee from any vendor, model provider, or platform we recommend.

FAQ

Questions About Working Together

Because the honest number depends on scope. A retrieval system over 500 clean documents and one over 5 million scanned pages are not the same project. We quote after a scoping call, and the quote is fixed.

It is a fixed fee agreed before we start, and it is the same for everyone at a given scope. Ask on a call and we will give you the number in that conversation.

Occasionally, as a partial substitution for a fee, and only where we would have taken the work anyway. It is not something we lead with.

On fixed-fee work, overruns caused by our estimation are ours to absorb. Scope changes you request are re-quoted before we act on them.

Yes. Project builds are phased with a decision point at each boundary, and retainers are month to month.

Invoiced per phase for project work, or monthly for retainers and embedded teams. Payment terms are agreed in the contract before the engagement starts.

Get started

Tell Us What You Are Building

One call is usually enough for us to tell you whether we are the right studio for it, and roughly what it would take.