Celadon
ServicesBuild
Build turns an approved decision into a working system — designed, integrated, 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.
Scope the first workflow →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 narrow build against real data to retire the largest technical unknown before the full system is committed.
The working system itself, built on your stack and designed for the people who will actually use it.
Source connections, transforms, permissions, and the boundaries that decide what the system can and cannot see.
A test set drawn from real cases, measured before launch and repeatable afterward, plus deliberate testing of how the system fails.
Access control, retention posture, logging, and review paths, aligned to the requirements your organization already operates under.
Release into the environment where the work happens, rather than a standalone tool nobody opens.
Focused training for the specific teams using the system — what it is good at, where it is weak, and when to override it.
Architecture, data flows, evaluation criteria, and operational runbooks, written so another engineer can pick it up.
A defined window after launch to resolve what only real usage reveals, agreed in advance rather than negotiated later.
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.
Most first production phases land in the $50,000–$150,000 range. The exact fee is set only after the Decision Sprint (or an equivalent scope) has defined the objective, acceptance criteria, and assumptions. 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 licence 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 workflow, the systems it touches, and what would have to be true for it to work in production.
A focused conversation about the business problem, the systems involved, the constraints, and what would need to be true for AI to create measurable value.