# Substrate Build

Every team is rebuilding the same platform layer, badly.

Six to eight weeks: the multi-tenant substrate your agent systems run on — routing, memory, evaluation, and spend control — delivered to production and handed to your team.

6-8 weeks · Quoted on the call

For reference, past builds of this shape have landed in the $45-75K range over six to eight weeks. The number depends entirely on tenancy model, cloud, and how much already exists — quoting a range before seeing that would be guessing at your expense.

## Who this is for

- You are shipping agents on shared infrastructure with no tenant isolation and it is starting to show.
- The platform layer is consuming the roadmap and it is not what your customers pay for.
- You need this in production in weeks, handed over, not a consulting relationship in perpetuity.

## Who this is not for

- You want a long-term managed platform. This is built, delivered, and handed over — the operating burden stays with your team, by design.
- You are still validating the product. This engagement is built for scale — start with the simplest version that proves the product, and bring it here when traction asks for a real platform.

## What you get

- Tenant isolation and the routing layer, on AWS Bedrock, AgentCore, or Azure.
- Memory and retrieval architecture chosen against your workload, with the trade-offs written out.
- Evaluation harness and spend control built in from the start rather than retrofitted.
- Middleware and deployment templates in the languages your team actually writes.
- Handover: documentation, runbooks, and enough pairing that your team owns it before the engagement ends.

## How it runs

### Weeks 1-2: Architecture

Tenancy model, routing, memory, and the isolation boundary decided and written down before a line of it is built.

### Weeks 3-6: Build

The substrate built against your workload, in your cloud, with your team in the pull requests rather than watching from outside.

### Weeks 7-8: Production and handover

Load-tested to your concurrency target, shipped, documented, and handed over with the runbooks.

## Reported experience

- 250-450: Concurrent agent instances delivered to production
- 6+: Platforms built and handed to client teams
- ~40%: Release-cycle overhead reduction across four teams

## Evidence and limits

Graymatter token-recall examples (author-reported, reviewed 2026-09-22): Repository-reported repeated-context experiments; not a universal reduction in API spend. Retrieval quality, embedding costs and workload change the result. The benchmark was not rerun for this website review.

[Source](https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter/tree/758bfa2d02f35b9f878affed21353c684e16afa1/benchmarks)

Anonymized client outcomes (author-reported, reviewed 2026-09-22): Reported by Nick Cerutti; client identities and raw operational records are not public. $200K/year is aggregate savings across engagements. $40K/day was projected exposure; 72 hours describes that incident, not a response or resolution guarantee. Zero-known-incident statements describe observations, not proof of absence.

[Source](https://nickcerutti.com/work)

[Inference economics: reproducible cost model](https://nickcerutti.com/evidence/inference-economics-sample.md) — Executable arithmetic with workload assumptions, quality gates and unmeasured latency.

## Questions

### Why is there no published price?

Because scope moves more here than anywhere else — a single-cloud build with an existing evaluation harness and a three-cloud build with none are not the same job. The reference range is above; the real number comes out of the scoping call.

### Do we own the code?

Yes, entirely, and it is yours from the first commit. It lives in your repositories on your infrastructure throughout.

### What happens after handover?

Nothing, unless you want it to. Some teams move to a fractional retainer afterwards; most do not need to, which is the point of the handover.

## Contact

[Discuss this engagement](mailto:n@nickcerutti.com) · [Pricing and terms](https://nickcerutti.com/pricing)

Canonical page: https://nickcerutti.com/services/substrate-build