Mainline
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How it works

Assess the whole business. Rank what it costs. Build the top of the list, then the rest.

Five steps, each priced on its own, each leaving you with something running. You usually arrive with one problem. The assessment decides the order, and sometimes it is not the one you led with.

Step 0 / Free / Thirty minutes

Working session

Not a pitch. We walk your business with you, list every place senior judgment is spent on messy input, and put a rough number on the largest one while you watch. It ends with a Blueprint proposal or a no.

Step 1 / Fixed fee / Two weeks

Operations Blueprint

In two weeks we map how your business runs today, rank every costly workflow with a dollar figure from your numbers, and show a working proof of the top one on your own data. Or you do not pay.

The eight sections

  • An executive summary in your own words
  • Current-state maps: how the work flows today
  • The cost of inaction, per workflow, from your numbers
  • The proposed systems, in plain language
  • The ranked roadmap, with what can run in parallel
  • A conservative ROI
  • The investment, per phase
  • Next steps
Plus the proof: three to five of your real past inputs, last quarter's quotes or a week of calls, run through a thin slice of the top-ranked workflow and shown next to what your business actually did. A sandbox, no integrations, no logins for your staff, thrown away afterward. The bar is one moment: you see your own job and a number close to yours.

Credited against the build if you proceed within 30 days.

Step 2 / Fixed price per phase

Build the top of the roadmap

Usually one workflow, two in parallel when they are independent and your team can absorb both. Each phase lands as a usable increment with a pre-read your people can act on. Phase plans, decision records, and pre-reads are part of the product: they let you trust a solo builder, and they let another engineer take over later.

Payment 40% at kickoff, 30% at the midpoint, 30% at acceptance, or per phase on delivery.

Step 3 / Monthly, from day one

Platform fee, from day one of production use

The price of the system existing: dedicated hosting with managed database and nightly backups, model usage up to an allowance of drafts each month, security and dependency updates, support with a written response window, and a monthly value report. Monitoring is our job. You should never be the one to report an outage.

You hear from us at 80% of the draft allowance, before anything costs extra.

Step 4 / Fixed price, one item at a time

The rest of the roadmap

Once the first system is doing the work, the next roadmap item is sold at a fixed price from the price list, and each module lifts the platform fee a little. Sold against your Blueprint's roadmap, so it never reads as a bill.

How pricing works

Every step is priced on its own and quoted before it starts. The Blueprint is a fixed fee, credited against the build if you go ahead within 30 days. A build is a fixed price per phase, checked against the annual cost the Blueprint found: above about a third of it, the workflow is not worth building yet. The platform fee is monthly from the first day of production use and covers the system existing.

Ask and we will tell you the numbers. They come from a price list, not from what we think you can pay.

How we build

Data, then workflow, then intelligence.

First a system of record for what lives in fifteen tools and one person's head. Then the workflow on top of it. Then the model. Every credible account of AI projects failing is the reverse order.

The AI proposes. A person owns the number.

Anything that touches money or a commitment goes through a review gate, is frozen when approved, and logs every correction. It is a product feature, a liability posture, and the sales argument at once.

Proof on your data before the build.

The Blueprint is a document, but it ends with the top-ranked workflow running on your own inputs. You should not have to sign for something you have not seen do your job.

Who owns what

You own

  • Your data, configuration, cost history, and client-specific rules.
  • A perpetual, non-exclusive license to the deployed system for your own use.
  • A copy of the code in a GitHub organization you own, with us as a collaborator.
  • Every approved artifact, frozen, and the log of every correction.

Mainline owns

  • The platform: the reusable code, prompts, schemas, rules engines, and pipelines.
  • The right to build the same workflow for another business in another industry. It is how the second build costs less than the first.
  • Not your data. It is used only to provide the service, and never to train a model.
Estimates and other money-bearing outputs are proposals that require your review and approval. The product enforces it, and so does the contract.

Start here

What eats your senior people's time every week?

Thirty minutes, free, not a pitch. Bring the workflow that costs you the most and we will put a rough number on it before the call ends.

Book a working sessionhello@getmainline.ai