AI writes code that runs. It does not choose the cheap way to do things, it chooses the common way. Two senior architects read your app and tell you what is quietly costing you every month, what it would cost instead, and what happens when you have ten times the users.
A worked example
Illustration of the shape we find, not a specific client. Every number here is one we have seen, on code nobody would call broken.
What it costs now
€610 a month
€85 for the same product, same features, same users
What the report says
Every query returns the right answer, every page renders, every test passes. The app simply asks the database for the same thing eight hundred times instead of once, because nobody told it not to. You pay for that twice: once a month on the bill, and once again on the day the traffic doubles and it stops responding. The wrong foundation costs almost nothing while you are small. It is the most expensive thing you own the month you start to scale.
Where the money goes the five we find in almost every app
These are not bugs. Nothing crashes, no alert fires, and no tool reports them, because the code is correct. They are choices, made by something that had no idea what your bill looks like.
01
One list of twenty items becomes twenty one separate queries instead of one. It is invisible at ten rows and it is your entire hosting bill at ten thousand. The usual fix is a few lines.
02
A managed queue for forty jobs a day. A vector database for two hundred records. A search service for a table you could filter in the database you already pay for. AI reaches for whatever is popular, not whatever fits.
03
No token limit, no timeout, the whole document sent when a paragraph would do, and the expensive model used for work a cheap one does just as well. This is usually the single largest line on the bill and the easiest to halve.
04
A job that checks for new work every minute, all day, forever, when the other service would have called you. You pay for the asking, every minute, whether there is anything there or not.
05
No pagination, no index, everything loaded to filter it in code. This one is quiet until the month you get traction, and then it arrives as an outage rather than an invoice.
The larger number what the bill is a symptom of
Overpaying by a few hundred a month is annoying. It is not what this is really about. The same choices that inflate the bill are the ones that decide whether the app survives its first good month, and those cost differently.
01
A data model that cannot represent what you now sell is cheap to change in week two and a migration with downtime in month nine. Firms that do this work charge between €10,000 and €35,000 for the rebuild. The version where you catch it early costs a morning.
02
Your first serious customer sends a security questionnaire. If the honest answers are no, that deal stalls until they are yes, and the work takes as long as it takes.
03
Everything holds at the traffic you tested with. The interesting question is what happens at ten times that, and it is answerable now, cheaply, rather than live.
Pricing fixed, published, and the first tier comes off the second
Every price here is what you pay. Each one buys a fixed block of our time rather than an open scope, so you know the number before we start and there is no hourly bill to watch. For comparison, firms that do the rebuild instead charge between €10,000 and €35,000.
If what we find is worth less than three times the fee in avoidable annual cost, or the report does not contain three High or Critical findings, you pay nothing and the report is still yours. The whole fee comes off the Sprint if you book within 30 days.
We agree the list on day one and write it down. If we deliver less than the list, we invoice less, in proportion. 30 day warranty: if we broke something that worked before, we fix it free.
For the case where a team is about to start working on code one person generated. Cancel with 30 days notice after month three.
The obvious questions
Maybe not, and we will tell you that on a twenty minute call before you pay anything. The honest rule: if you are spending under about a hundred a month and nobody outside your team uses the app yet, wait. Come back when the bill moves, when a real customer arrives, or when someone is about to look at the code. Those are the moments this pays for itself.
You can ask, and it will change something. The difficulty is that it does not know what your bill is, which parts of the app matter, or what you are about to do next, so it optimises whatever you happened to paste in. We use models heavily ourselves, to read the whole repository and map what calls what. That is a large part of why this costs what it does rather than several times more, and we would rather say so than let you assume we read every line by hand. Deciding which of the findings is worth your money is the part you are paying two people for.
You are not handing it over. Read only access, under a mutual NDA signed before we open anything. We ask for a read only repository invite or a zip. We do not ask for, and will refuse, production credentials, your database, or anything with a real customer in it. We work on our own machines and delete our copy within 14 days.
Then you pay nothing and you keep the report. We commit to finding at least three times the fee in avoidable annual cost, and that is a number you can check against your own invoices rather than take on trust. Note also that our fee is the same whether we find one thing or thirty, so nobody here earns more by exaggerating.
Between us we have architected systems and led engineering teams for large enterprises in jewellery retail, banking, automotive and other regulated industries, the kind of places where an architectural decision is expensive enough that somebody counts it. We are bound by those contracts and cannot name them, so do not take our word for any of it. Book twenty minutes instead and judge us on the answers. Bring the part of your app you are least sure about, and we will tell you what we would look at and why, before you have paid us anything. We will also tell you if we think you do not need us.
Talk to us one reply, from a person, within one business day