Book a scoping session — $750

OPERATE-01 · OPERATE

Your AI, Kept Running

One person accountable for your live AI system — watching it every day, keeping costs down, and catching failures before your users do.

$15,000/monthOngoing

The written plan comes first — and the $750 credits toward Design or any Build for 90 days.

Operate is not refundable — it is cancel-anytime with 30 days' notice, prorated to your end date. Guarantee on the work, no lock-in on the relationship.

After you pay
  1. 01Pay securely by card
  2. 02Pick a time that works
  3. 03Your written plan in a few days
AWhat you getFIXED SCOPE
  • 01One person accountable for an agreed set of your live AI
  • 02Daily watching, cost and drift checks, and fast response when something breaks
  • 03A short written report each month: what ran, what changed, what to watch
  • 04Fixes and improvements within the agreed set
  • 05Cancel any time with 30 days' notice
BWHAT THIS ISTHE BRIEF

Live AI with no owner slowly gets worse: it drifts off the mark, costs creep up, and failures go quiet until a user finds them. This puts one person in charge of an agreed set of your live AI — watching it every day, keeping costs down, fixing what breaks, and sending you a short written report each month of what ran, what changed, and what to watch. Leave any time with 30 days' notice. Every Build already includes a stretch of this — 30, 60, or 90 days by size.

BUILT FOR CTO or VP Engineering with AI running live and nobody whose job it is when it drifts, leaks, or breaks quietly.

CIS THIS FOR YOUFIT CHECK

WHEN YOU NEED THIS

  • The AI works but nobody owns it
  • Costs climb and no one can say why
  • Failures surface from users, not from monitoring
  • The engineer who built it is leaving or gone
  • A Build's included Operate period is ending

NOT FOR YOU IF

  • Nothing is running live yet — start with Design or a Build
  • You need a one-time deliverable, not ongoing ownership
  • No counterpart to make decisions with
DWHAT IT'S WORTHTHE RETURN

Compare it to the alternatives: a full-time AI hire runs $200K–$350K a year plus a months-long search, and no-owner costs you in silent failures and drift. One accountable owner, month to month, cancel with 30 days' notice.

D3IF SOMETHING BREAKSSEVERITY AND RESPONSE

The escalation path, before you need it.

Your operations team will ask for this and will not accept an undefined answer. Here it is, and the same table goes into the statement of work.

COVERAGE Monday to Friday, 09:00–18:00 US Central Time, excluding US federal holidays.

SeverityWhat it meansAcknowledgedWhat happens next
Severity 1Production is down, or data is at risk.Acknowledged within 4 business hoursWork starts the same business day and continues until it is stable.
Severity 2Running, but degraded, drifting, or costing more than it should.Acknowledged within 1 business dayFixed inside the current work cycle, or scheduled with a date.
Severity 3A question, a change request, or something to watch.Acknowledged within 2 business daysHandled in the normal run of the engagement.
Channel
One email address that reaches the operator directly, agreed at engagement start — not a shared inbox and not a ticket queue.
Escalation
If an acknowledgment window passes without a reply, escalate to the direct contact named in your statement of work, agreed with you at engagement start. It reaches the same person. A one-person practice has no tier above that, and we would rather say so than draw you an escalation tree with one name in every box.
Not covered
  • Planned maintenance, announced in advance.
  • Outages in systems ML LABS does not operate — your cloud, your vendors, your network.
  • Work outside the agreed set. It is quoted, not refused.
D4CAPACITYHOW MANY AT ONCE

How many of these run at once.

  • 01One Build at a time. Your proposal comes back with a committed start date, and if the slot is taken you find out before you sign rather than after.
  • 02Operate engagements run concurrently and the number is capped, so the person accountable for your live system is not quietly carrying five others. Ask how many are running before you sign and you get the count, not a reassurance.
  • 03Over capacity, you go on a waitlist with a committed date. Never a silent queue, and never a yes we cannot keep.
D5THE ONE-PERSON QUESTIONNAMED FIRST

Yes, it is one person. Here is what that costs you, and what it buys you.

You are not worried about documentation. You are worried about month four of a six-figure build, or month fourteen of a retainer, and one person who stops answering. That is the right thing to worry about, and reassurance is not an answer to it. Structure is.

What it costs you

A team of forty has redundancy you do not get here. We are not going to pretend otherwise — it is the one row in the comparison below that an agency wins outright.

What we do about it

  • Everything lives in your repository from day oneCode, runbook, and the architecture record land in a repository you own, continuously — not as a handover event at the end. There is no version of this where the work is trapped somewhere you cannot reach.
  • Credentials live in your secret storeNever in a repository, ours or yours. You grant access scoped to the statement of work and you revoke it whenever you decide to.
  • No standby engineer on retainer — and we will not pretend otherwiseSome firms answer this with a named successor kept on standby. We do not have one, and inventing one would be exactly the kind of reassurance this section refuses to give you. The structural answer is the one above: because the repository, the runbook and the credentials are already yours, whoever picks the work up — your own team, or someone you hire — starts from a written system rather than an excavation. That is a difference you can check in month one instead of discovering in month fourteen.
  • An unavailability clause with teethIf ML LABS goes non-responsive for five consecutive business days, Operate fees stop and prorate to that date. You are not paying for silence, and the handover package is already in your hands because it always was.

What it buys you

No account team, no handoffs, no context reset, and nobody learning your system on your budget. The person who scoped it is the person who built it and the person who answers when it breaks. That is not available at forty engineers, at any price.

The bar we would want you to hold us to, written down before you hold us to it. Read it →

EVERSUS THE ALTERNATIVESTRADE-OFFS
No owner — drift, cost creep, and silent failures accumulate
A full-time AI lead ($200K–$350K/yr, months to hire)
Rotating consultants — the context resets every engagement
Whoever built it, in their spare time
FRELATED STEPSTHE LADDER
OPERATE-02All Your AI, Kept RunningMore than an agreed set — one owner for all of it, at full priorityVIEW →BUILD-01One Workflow That WorksSomething new to build — every Build includes its Operate periodVIEW →
NO LOCK-IN — 30 DAYS' NOTICE

No lock-in. 30 days' notice. Leave whenever you want.

Operate is not refundable — it is cancel-anytime with 30 days' notice, prorated to your end date. Guarantee on the work, no lock-in on the relationship.

The full terms → Security & data handling →