Add AI to Your Existing App — One Production Feature in One to Two Weeks

The Starter package is $799 and takes one to two weeks. It covers one AI feature, either a chatbot, smart search, summarisation or content generation; prompt design with test cases; integration into your existing codebase; API key management with cost caps; basic usage logging; and documentation with a handoff call. It does not include retrieval over private documents, workflow automation, a UI redesign or model fine-tuning, and those exclusions are written into the scope so the price holds.

When the feature has to answer from your own data or automate real operational work, the Professional package is $2,499 over three to five weeks: retrieval over documents, a help centre or a database, up to three automated workflows with human review steps, up to two integrations such as Slack, HubSpot, Zendesk, Notion or Google Workspace, an evaluation set, a cost dashboard, guardrails with PII handling and two weeks of support. Enterprise is $6,999 over six to ten weeks for an internal AI gateway with budgets and an audit log, private model access through AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI, and assistants for up to two teams.

For comparison, a senior AI developer in the US or UK bills $150 to $250 an hour, so $799 buys less than one day of their time. If you would rather buy hours against an existing backlog, I bill $60 to $90 an hour.

The first two days are reading, not writing: your repository, your deployment process, your conventions and the place in the product where the feature will live. I work in a branch in your repository and open pull requests your team can review, so nothing reaches production that your own developers have not seen. My home stack is TypeScript with Next.js, React, NestJS and Node.js on PostgreSQL, and I have shipped on Firebase and MongoDB as well.

If your product runs on something else, such as Rails, Django or Laravel, the AI layer does not have to live inside it. It can run as a small separate service behind an API that your app calls, which keeps model keys off the client, puts cost caps and logging in one place, and lets your team keep working in the language they know.

The best first feature removes a step your users already find tedious. Summarising a long record before someone opens it. Drafting the reply, the description or the report that a user would otherwise write from a blank page. Searching by meaning rather than exact keywords. Answering how-to questions inside the product. Each of these is one feature, fits the Starter scope, and can be measured by whether people keep using it.

The features to avoid first are the ones that act without review on anything that cannot be undone, such as sending emails to customers or changing billing. Those belong in a later phase with human approval steps, which is what the Professional package adds. Part of the free first call is me telling you which of your ideas is a one-week feature and which is a three-month project wearing a disguise.

CakeOrFake is the closest example to this kind of work. It is a Chrome extension that places AI directly inside an interface I do not control, Upwork's recruiter dashboard. It reads freelancer proposals, assigns risk scores, flags warning signs and writes the scores back into the page, with 35 cloud functions behind it, sign-in through Google, Facebook and Apple, and subscription billing through RevenueCat and Stripe.

Contently AI puts OpenAI, Anthropic and Groq behind one interface so a marketing team can generate and schedule social posts, which is the same model-routing pattern that keeps an added feature affordable. Virtual Client uses Gemini Live for real-time voice and OpenAI and Anthropic models for rubric-scored feedback, in production across several organisations with roughly 2,500 practice sessions delivered.

I work remotely from Bangladesh at UTC+6, with no daylight saving. For a UK team that means I am online through your whole afternoon. For the US East Coast I overlap your morning until around noon and again in your evening, and we fix one weekly call that never moves. For Saudi Arabia the fit is unusually good: Riyadh is three hours behind me and we share a Sunday to Thursday working week, so your Sunday is a working day for me too.

The paperwork is what your finance and legal teams expect: a short contractor agreement with scope, price, confidentiality and full IP assignment, or your own NDA and contractor template if you have one. If your company must hire through an employer-of-record or contractor platform such as Deel or Remote, that works. Payment is by milestone in USD through Wise, Payoneer, bank transfer or a Stripe invoice.