Embedded engineering firm at $10–15K per month. Software, AI infrastructure, creative production, SEO and content, operations — five capabilities under one bill instead of five vendors. No setup fees, no à la carte invoices, no surprise charges.
An engagement bundles the work most digital-native businesses split across four to six vendors. Same retainer covers the engineering, the AI agents, the marketing operations, the creative output, and the day-to-day ops. Each engagement weights these differently depending on what the business actually needs.
Custom web, mobile, and API engineering. Net-new builds, rebuilds of legacy systems, and the integrations that hold the rest of the stack together.
Custom AI agents embedded in your tools — Telegram, Slack, web. Self-learning knowledge base. Built on the same open source platform we ship as SAE4U Agent.
SEO + GEO, AI marketing-bot, competitor analytics, Google Keyword Planner API, Playwright audits, PageSpeed monitoring, full GA4 + Search Console + Google Ads instrumentation.
AI-assisted video production, real footage, automated post. Vertical social-ready output for the channels where your audience actually scrolls.
The "we run a piece of your operation" core. On-call engineering, dev sprints, evolutionary changes, fractional CTO advisory backup. The thing that keeps everything else running.
For businesses that don't need a full-time CTO yet, but need senior engineering leadership in the room. Architecture decisions, hiring help, technical due diligence.
Engineering only compounds when the team stays put across quarters. We engage at retainer, not by deliverable, so we're aligned on long-term outcomes. Onboarding is the first month — no separate setup invoice, no migration surcharge, no "discovery phase" billed extra.
No multi-week sales cycle, no procurement theater. We've run the discovery → engagement transition enough times that the path is short and the conversation is real.
You walk us through current state — tools, team, where the leaks are, what's blocking the next quarter. We listen, ask questions, and tell you honestly whether the embedded retainer model fits. If it doesn't, we'll say so and point you elsewhere.
If the model fits, we map your needs against the five capabilities. Most engagements lean into two or three; we identify which. We confirm priorities for the first 90 days, agree on rituals (weekly sync, monthly written report), and set the retainer in the $10–15K band.
Short engagement letter (2 pages, plain English), 3-month minimum, then month-to-month. First month is real work — onboarding, audit, first deliverable — not a billed "discovery phase." Sprint two is the rhythm.
Three factors: capability mix (one heavy line vs. balanced across three), integration complexity (greenfield vs. legacy stack with migrations), and team load (single-product business vs. multi-channel operation with concurrent priorities). The number is settled in the first call, not auctioned. There's no "premium tier" upsell on top.
3-month minimum, then month-to-month. The first month is onboarding — instrumentation wiring, tool integration, first audit, first deliverable. By month three, the rhythm is real and you have data to evaluate. Cancellation is a 30-day notice, no exit fees, no clawback.
No. Embedded engagements don't have onboarding fees because the first month is the onboarding. You pay one monthly retainer from day one, and the first month's work is heavily front-loaded toward audit, instrumentation, and quick wins. Anyone charging a separate $5–25K "setup" on top of an ongoing retainer is double-billing.
Yes. If a new project surfaces — a custom integration, a one-off video pipeline, a fractional CTO advisory engagement on top of operations work — we price it as an add-on per service line, not by hour. Add-ons are quoted in writing before work starts. No retroactive invoices for "extra hours."
Yes, in one specific format: the Starter engagement above — 4–6 week bounded sprint with one deliverable, fixed fee. It's intentionally narrow because our default model is embedded retainer, and we don't want to fragment attention across many small one-offs.
If you need pure project-shop work (multiple parallel projects, fixed milestones, no ongoing relationship intended), we'll point you to project-based shops we trust. We're not a fit for that mode.
Code, data, knowledge bases, and infrastructure are all yours. Self-hosted setups stay on your VPS. Managed setups can be transferred or open-sourced (the underlying platform is already open source — see SAE4U Agent). 30-day notice, full handoff, no lock-in.
Three structural reasons. First, embedded teams build context that compounds — a vendor restarting on every project loses that. Second, real businesses have evolving priorities; project scoping locks both sides into stale assumptions within weeks. Third, retainer aligns incentives on outcomes (does the business grow?) instead of deliverables (did we ship the spec?). For digital-native operations, the spec model is increasingly obsolete.