01 · about us
a senior leader can describe the thing they need in ninety seconds. what they cannot do is turn that into a working system without spending three months and a vendor relationship on it.
an open, non-profit lab that takes a described problem & returns a built thing, usually inside a day.
the reason it can be fast is not that the people here are faster typists. it is that most of what gets asked for is assembly .. a connector, a parser, a schedule, a screen. the work that used to be six weeks of writing is now a day of wiring, & the price should reflect that. it mostly does not, because the people quoting it have an agency to keep lit.
so the estimate here starts low on purpose & the factors behind it are published rows in a database rather than a number somebody felt.
enterprise leadership, indie hackers, operators, investors, PE owners. anyone with a problem & no appetite for a discovery phase.
anyone who claims a brief. teams form around a claim, & more than one team can chase the same brief.
the buyer picks, but only from builds that already passed a review on code, connectors, scalability & security.
02 · the money
held in escrow, released after review, split by a policy that is versioned in the database. the row that applied to a payout can be read back years later.
| % | bucket | why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| loading the live policy… | ||
the ten percent that stays with the lab is the only money the organisation keeps, & it exists to fund the next round of builds. it is not a margin.
03 · the estimate
this is the whole model. there is nothing else behind the number .. no pricing team, no anchor, no discount to be negotiated off a fiction.
| factor | value | what it means |
|---|---|---|
| loading… | ||
04 · where my own argument gives way
a day is enough to wire connectors that have documented apis. it is not enough for the system whose api is a pdf, or a login page, or a person. the briefs that arrive here will not sort themselves into those two piles neatly, & the 24-hour number will be wrong for some of them in a way the estimate cannot see in advance.
ten percent pays for code, connector, scalability & security checks. that same ten percent is paid whether the review is thorough or cursory, & the reviewer is on the same side of the table as the people being reviewed. a real answer means rotating reviewers & publishing findings, not just verdicts. today it publishes verdicts.
two teams building the same brief sounds like discovery. it is also two teams, one of which does not get paid properly for real work. the ten percent participation share is the patch, & a patch is what it is. if it turns out that most builders quietly stop entering contested briefs, the mechanic has failed & that will show up in the data long before anyone here admits it.
so the version worth defending is narrower than the one on the home page. not this replaces agencies. more like: for the class of problem that is mostly assembly, the current price is set by people who need it to be higher, & a lab that runs the whole ledger in public is a reasonable way to find out what the real number is.
05 · open
listings, teams, reviews, escrow states, payout rows & the policy version behind each one. read-only to anyone, over the same api this site uses.
the site is four static pages & three scripts. the logic that matters lives in database functions, which are readable in the repository.