- What is the typical timeline for an integration project?
- Discovery typically takes one to two weeks, and up to three for a complicated stack. A typical integration ships in two to eight weeks after that, and up to twelve when several systems are involved or their APIs are badly behaved. That is three to ten weeks end to end for most projects, and fifteen at the outside. We scope the work in detail before quoting, and the price doesn't move once we start. Those dates assume timely access to sandbox credentials and quick answers on business rules. If we're blocked waiting on either, the timeline shifts with it.
- How much of my team's time will this take?
- We do all the coding, but we can't build this in a vacuum. Expect around 2–5 hours in the first week getting us access and walking us through your workflow, plus an hour or two at the end to sanity-check what we've shipped. We move fast, but if business questions sit unanswered for days, the project stalls.
- Will this disrupt our live operations?
- It shouldn't. We build and test everything in a sandbox while your business keeps running as normal. Live data is always less predictable than test data, so we cut over during your quietest hours and stay online to monitor the first live syncs, catching anything odd before customers notice.
- What happens when something breaks?
- Third-party APIs go down, humans type strange things into forms, and AI components occasionally misclassify an input or hallucinate a value. Some of that is predictable, some of it isn't, and AI in particular is non-deterministic by design, so we add guardrails and human review wherever the stakes are high. Monitoring and error resilience are core principles for us: every integration we ship is instrumented to surface failures the moment they happen, so nothing sits broken in silence. We respond quickly and do our best to get things back on track, whether that's a one-line fix from us or a quick retry once a value is corrected.
- How do you handle third-party API changes post-launch?
- Every project includes a 30-day fix window after launch. Clients on a retainer go further: we handle API changes before they break the integration. Without a retainer, we quote any work that falls outside the fix window, or you can move to a retainer at any point.
- Do you sign NDAs, and how are our credentials secured?
- Yes, we sign NDAs as standard. Credentials live in a secrets manager (1Password, Doppler, or whatever you already use), scoped to the minimum permissions the integration needs. They never go in source code or into the repo.
- Who retains ownership of the developed code?
- You own the code. We commit directly to your repo, or hand it over at the end of the engagement. No platform lock-in, no license fees, no black-box middleware sitting between you and the systems it touches.
- Do you provide ongoing maintenance after the project launches?
- Maintenance is optional. Every project includes a 30-day fix window after launch. After that you can move to a retainer from $250/month, or take it in-house. Either way, you get the runbooks.
- Are you able to integrate with legacy systems that lack a public API?
- Yes. When there's no modern API, we work with what's available: SFTP/CSV, direct database access, SOAP, or scraping as a last resort.
- Can you work with proprietary or lesser-known software?
- Yes. Most of our work is fully custom, and niche or in-house tools are normal for us. If your system can expose data somehow (API, flat file, database, or webhook), we can integrate it.
- We want to use AI but don't know where it fits. How do we figure that out?
- Most clients want AI but aren't sure where it fits. An Integration Audit is the right place to start, because AI works best on workflows that are already cleanly defined. We map how the process actually runs, tidy up the chaos, then layer AI only where judgment is genuinely needed: reading free-text emails, classifying messy inputs, or extracting data from documents. Skip the cleanup and you'll just have AI making the same mess faster.
- What is your scoping and pricing model?
- Discovery costs $500 to $1,000 and takes one to three weeks. It ends in a written specification with a fixed price on it. Development is quoted from that spec and runs $4,000 to $25,000 over two to twelve weeks, separately from the discovery fee. Support is optional and starts at $250 a month. Those figures are indicators until we have scoped your job. Once you sign off, the only thing that moves the price is a change you ask for.