01
Discovery call.
Thirty minutes. We learn what you're shipping and whether we're the right fit. No charge, no commitment.
AI engineering is the lead practice. We also build the SaaS, commerce, and advisory layers your AI features depend on. Fixed-price, hourly against a budget cap, or retainer — the price you see below is the price you'll see in the scope.
The full AI lifecycle in production. Not demos, not POCs — the unglamorous infrastructure that keeps LLM features running after launch: evaluation harnesses, retrieval pipelines, guardrails, cost telemetry, model-routing.
End-to-end product engineering for B2B SaaS. We take products from prototype to revenue-ready, or take revenue-ready products and rebuild them to scale. Frequently the home of an AI feature.
For brands scaling past their platform's defaults — headless storefronts, custom Shopify apps, AI-driven product search and recommendations, checkout extensions, and the integrations that make a modern DTC stack work.
Fractional CTO and architecture reviews. AI strategy and vendor selection (Claude vs OpenAI vs open-weight), code audits, hiring plans, and the call no one wants to make on whether your prototype is ready for production.
How a project actually runs at the studio. Six steps, predictable, transparent. The phases line up with how an internal team would run the work — because that's the model we built around.
Thirty minutes. We learn what you're shipping and whether we're the right fit. No charge, no commitment.
Within five business days you get a written scope: deliverables, milestones, price, assumptions. You redline before any contract is signed.
MSA and SOW signed. Shared Slack channel, Linear board, calendar invite for week-one alignment.
Weekly demos, daily written updates, incremental delivery to staging. We ship code, not slide decks.
Production cutover with rollback plan, monitoring dashboards, and runbooks. We're on-call for seventy-two hours.
Thirty days of support included. After that, optional retainer or hourly — your call.
The questions we get asked most often, answered up front. If something's missing, send us a note.
For well-scoped projects, fixed-price aligns our incentives with shipping. For exploratory work, hourly against a budget cap. Either way, you see the estimate before kickoff.
USD via Stripe (card or ACH) or wire to our US business account. Larger fixed-price projects: 30% on signing, 30% midpoint, 40% on delivery.
Yes. Mutual NDAs before any code or sensitive material is shared. Standard MSA + project-specific SOW before kickoff. We'll work from your paper if you have it.
You do. Work-for-hire. On final invoice, all IP, source, and deliverables transfer to your company. We retain license to generic patterns we've built for ourselves; nothing client-specific.
Sometimes — for advisory or focused builds under twenty thousand. For larger builds we generally want to see committed funding so we can plan around realistic timelines.
QiYuan Labs LLC is registered in the United States. The team is distributed across North America and Asia-Pacific. Default working hours overlap US Pacific; we'll match your team's cadence if you need it.
Usually, yes — for advisory and smaller builds. Larger projects book two to four weeks out. Send us a note for an exact lead-time.
A twenty-person team, body-shop staffing, or visual-design-only projects. Long-term managed services or 24/7 SRE also aren't our model. For those, we can introduce you to people we trust.
You'll hear back from a senior engineer within one business day with next steps and a rough estimate.