ServicesBuild
Build turns an approved decision into a working system, designed, integrated, and evaluated against real failure modes, and handed over with the documentation to run it. Delivered in fixed-fee phases, each with its own objective and acceptance criteria.
Start a conversation →A demo proves a model can produce a plausible answer. Production requires something harder: that the system is right often enough to be trusted, wrong in ways that are caught, and maintainable by people who did not build it.
That difference is decided by architecture: how data is retrieved and grounded, where permissions are enforced, what happens on a failed lookup, how correctness is measured, and what the system does when it does not know. Those decisions are made before implementation starts, because they are expensive to reverse afterward.
A first production phase typically lands in the $75,000–$150,000 range. The exact fee is set only after a Decision Sprint, or an existing decision package that documents the objective, source systems, constraints, stakeholders, acceptance criteria, budget assumptions, and principal failure modes.
These are priced into the phase when they are required, not assumed as free extras on every engagement.
If a named technical uncertainty must be resolved before committing to production, Celadon scopes a separate pre-production Build phase with its own hypothesis, evaluation set, fee, acceptance criteria, and stop or go decision. It is not bundled into the Sprint or the production fee.
Each phase has a written objective, its dependencies, the acceptance criteria that define done, and an explicit stop or go decision at the end. New scope becomes a new agreed phase rather than a meter running in the background. If a phase does not clear its acceptance criteria, that is a finding to act on, not a reason to invoice more hours.
The fee for each phase is set only after a Decision Sprint (or an existing decision package with the same essential inputs) has defined the objective, source systems, constraints, stakeholders, acceptance criteria, budget assumptions, and principal failure modes. A prior Celadon Sprint fee is credited in full against the first Build phase when it starts within 90 days.
Objective, workstream, dependencies, stakeholders, and the acceptance criteria that will decide whether it succeeded.
A fixed price for that phase, set before work begins, with the assumptions it depends on written down.
Implementation against the architecture, measured continuously against the evaluation set rather than judged on a final demo.
Review against acceptance criteria and choose deliberately: continue to the next phase, adjust, or stop.
Build is not open-ended engineering capacity, a team you rent by the month, or a backlog Celadon works through indefinitely. It is not a license to a Celadon platform. The system runs on infrastructure you control and the work product is yours.
Celadon also does not begin a build on a workflow that has not been examined. If the decision has not been made, the honest first step is a Decision Sprint, not a prototype.
A focused conversation about the opportunity, the systems it touches, and what would have to be true for it to work in production.
Tell us what you are evaluating, building, operating, or trying to get adopted. Email is the first step; if a call would be useful after we review the context, we will suggest one.
