ARC Systems — AI Incubator Program
From your whiteboard to shipped in thirty days.
You already know which part of the business is held together by a spreadsheet and somebody’s memory. We build the tool that replaces it — specified, built, deployed, monitored and handed over — and we do it in a month, not a quarter.
The problem
The demo worked. That was never the hard part.
Somebody on your team has already built the thing in a no-code tool or a weekend of prompting. It ran once, in front of you, and it was genuinely impressive. Then it hit real data, or a rate limit, or the one employee who uses it differently, and it stopped — quietly, in a way nobody noticed for three weeks.
That is the gap the whole market is currently ignoring. A prototype proves an idea is possible. It does not survive being depended on. The difference between the two is not more AI — it is error handling, monitoring, a deploy path, a rollback, and somebody who is still there in month four when a dependency changes underneath you.
Meanwhile the manual work carries on. The spreadsheet gets re-keyed, the handoff gets missed, the report gets rebuilt every Monday, and the cost of it never appears on a line item because it is paid in your team’s hours.
Our approach
Four milestones. You pay as each one lands.
The build is quoted as one fee and split into four equal payments, each released against a milestone you can see working. If we stall, you stop paying at the last thing that shipped.
Idea Mapped Day 1–7
We write the spec, the architecture and the proof path — what the tool does, what it talks to, what it must never do, and the specific test that proves it works. Most of the value of the whole programme is decided here, which is why it is not a kickoff call.
MVP Working Day 8–16
A deployed, tested tool on a real URL with real data. Not a demo on somebody’s laptop. You use it, you break it, and we fix what you broke before we go further.
Landing Page Up Day 17–23
A marketing page for the tool and a written case study of the build. If the tool is internal, this is the page that gets your team to adopt it. If it is customer-facing, it is the page that sells it.
Scalable & Secure Day 24–30
Hardening, documentation, the GitHub repository handed to you, and the tool enrolled in Fleet Health monitoring and The Hold update train. This is the milestone that decides whether you still have a working tool next year.
The proof
We built our own sales engine. Now we build yours.
Every pattern in this programme is one we run on ourselves first. These are not client case studies. They are the tools ARC depends on to operate, built exactly the way yours will be.
Drydock & Armada
Our own cold outreach system, end to end. Drydock owns the sending infrastructure — separate domains, individual mailboxes, warm-up, and a kill switch. Armada is the system of record above it: lead import, enrichment from free sources, drafting, a human review gate, then send.
Built for ourselves · Runs daily · Same stack we would give you
The Hold
The control plane that keeps every deployed tool current. A release is promoted once and every install pulls it — the installs reach out, the control plane never reaches in. That is why a client box can be behind a firewall we have no access to and still never miss a release.
Pull-only by design · Per-install feature flags · Rollback on failure
Fleet Health
The thing that tells us a tool broke before you notice. Every service reports in on a schedule; a service that goes quiet is treated as failed rather than assumed fine. It watches for units that died silently — the failure mode that otherwise sits undetected for weeks.
Dead-man’s heartbeat · Failed-unit sweep · Alerts, not dashboards
Pricing
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them.
The audit stands on its own. The build stands on its own. The retainer is for people who would rather not think about it again.
AI Tool Gap Audit
$250 one off
The diagnostic. Worth doing even if you never build anything with us.
- A walk through the operation to find where hours actually go
- Every bottleneck written down and ranked by what it costs you
- One scoped build proposal — what to build first, and why that one
- An honest read on which bottlenecks are not worth a tool at all
Full Tool Build
$5,800–$9,800 by scope
Paid in four equal milestones, each released against working software.
- Specification, architecture and proof path
- A deployed, tested tool on its own URL
- Marketing page and written case study
- Hardening, documentation and your GitHub repository
- Enrolled in Fleet Health monitoring and The Hold updates
- Thirty days from signed proposal to handover
Ops Retainer
$900–$2,500 per month
$900 for new founders, $2,500 standard. Only offered after a build.
- CAIOS client status — Fleet Health monitoring and The Hold updates
- The full ARC marketing ecosystem: ads, SEO, social and outbound
- Priority support with a 24-hour response commitment
- Continued development as the tool earns it
A build is $5,800 when the tool is one job done well against systems that already have an API. It moves toward $9,800 when it has to talk to several systems, hold state that matters, or be used by people outside your company. The audit is what tells us which of those you have — and the number in the proposal is the number you pay.
Common questions
What people ask before they commit
Is thirty days realistic, or is that the marketing number?
It is the number we work to, and it is measured from a signed proposal — not from the first conversation. It holds because the scope is fixed at the audit rather than discovered halfway through, and because we are building on a stack we already run. The thing that moves the date is almost always access: an account we are waiting on, or a decision only you can make. We will tell you on the day it happens rather than at the end.
What exactly do I own at the end?
The GitHub repository, the deployed tool, the documentation, the landing page and the case study. It is your code in your repository. If you end the relationship the next day, the tool keeps running and somebody else can pick it up — that is the point of the documentation milestone.
What does the $250 audit actually get me?
A worked map of where your operating hours go, the bottlenecks ranked by cost, and one scoped build proposal. It is a real piece of work rather than a sales call with a price on it — including the part where we tell you a bottleneck is not worth a tool. If you take the proposal to somebody else to build, that is allowed.
Do I have to take the retainer?
No. It is offered after a build, not before, and plenty of builds end at handover. Take it if you would rather not think about monitoring, updates and marketing again; skip it if you have people who will.
What happens if the tool breaks in month six?
On a retainer, Fleet Health tells us before you notice and it is our problem. Without one, you still have the repository, the documentation and the monitoring configuration — and you can come back to us for the fix at our normal rate. What you will not have is us watching it for you.
What kinds of tools is this for?
Internal operations, mostly: the reporting that gets rebuilt every week, the handoff between two systems that a person does by hand, the queue somebody works out of a spreadsheet, the intake form whose answers get re-typed somewhere else. It is also for agencies who need a client-facing tool of their own. It is not for building a consumer app or a venture-scale platform — that is a different budget and a different timeline, and we will say so.
Is this consulting?
No. Consulting ends in a document. This ends in software running on a URL, in your repository, with monitoring on it. The audit is the only part that produces a document, and it exists to decide what gets built.
A tool that runs the operation does not, by itself, bring anyone to the door. That is what ARC’s Local Authority Map is for — the ads, SEO and content side that makes a market aware you exist. Some clients need one, some need both, and the audit will tell you honestly which of the two is currently costing you more. Both are included once you are on the Ops Retainer.
Start here
Start with a $250 AI Tool Gap Audit.
Tell us what the business does and which part of it is currently held together by hand. We will come back with the audit scope and an invoice — and if we think there is nothing here worth building, we will say that instead.
Got it.
We will come back within one working day with the audit scope and an invoice. Nothing is charged before you approve it.
If it is faster to talk it through, book a strategy call and we will do the same thing live.