What the studio takes on, and the three shapes you can hire it in.
AI runs alongside the engineer at every step — not as autocomplete, but as a working partner that shortens the path from spec to shipped feature.
Detailed AI data-use posture — providers, retention settings, training warranty — is supplied with the engagement contract. Available on request.
Language models wired into legacy codebases without breaking what is already serving production traffic. Greenfield AI work is the easy case — the harder problem is real users, real data, real regulatory constraints. Avant Media has shipped AI-assisted engineering workflows inside regulated institutional finance.
Proof: MushRoom, the studio’s own multi-tenant property platform, ships AI-integrated features daily.
Architecture, code review, hiring guidance, deploy practice. The senior in the room when a small team is building something that has to hold up and there is nobody else to push back. Twenty years of production engineering, used as judgement — not as a billable hour.
Proof: a four-year embedded engagement leading the build and cloud migration of a 300,000-product B2B commerce platform on AWS.
Multi-tenant systems on AWS. Replatforming. Cloud migration. The kind of work where the spec is clear, the constraints are real, and a small team needs to ship without drowning the budget. Architecture and DevOps end-to-end, including the deploy culture that makes daily releases boring.
Proof: MushRoom multi-tenant on AWS, deploying daily; the B2B commerce platform’s cloud migration referenced above.
Three to five days, fixed fee, paid up front. The studio scopes a focused problem — an integration, a prototype, a feasibility check, an architecture review — and produces working code or a written recommendation by the end of the week.
Discovery is the lowest-commitment door into the studio and the cheapest way to test whether the days-not-sprints velocity claim holds up against your codebase, your stack, and your constraints.
Pricing posture
Fixed fee, paid up front. Indicative bands available on request.
Fixed fee, weeks rather than months, scope agreed in writing before kickoff. The studio takes a clearly-defined build — a feature, a service, a migration, a focused rewrite — and ships it. Pricing reflects shape and risk, not headcount.
Project work suits clients who already know what needs building and want a senior engineer to build it without an account-management layer in the middle. Most project engagements follow a successful Discovery sprint.
Pricing posture
Fixed fee, agreed in writing before kickoff. Indicative bands on request.
Ongoing senior-engineering presence billed hourly against a monthly retainer. The studio sits inside the client team — architecture decisions, code review, hiring guidance, on-call contribution, build-and-deploy ownership — for as long as the engagement holds value.
The Hostettler engagement is the proof: four years embedded with the Sursee team, Upwork-verified, full architectural lead through team build-out and platform expansion. Full testimonial on About the Studio →
Embedded is the natural progression once trust is earned through Discovery and Project work.
Pricing posture
Hourly rate against a monthly retainer. Bands on request.
Last reviewed: 2026-05-03