DEV.co
AI Application Development

Custom AI applications, end to end.

Customer-facing AI products, internal copilots, AI-native SaaS. We design, build, and deploy AI applications that ship — and stay shipped — with the architecture, observability, and ownership you'd expect from software you'd actually rely on.

Senior AI engineering · Hosted + private models · Full code ownership · Eval-first delivery

Five categories of AI applications we build.

Chat & assistants

Conversational interfaces grounded in your data, brand voice, and product context.

Copilots & in-product AI

AI features inside an existing product surface, accelerating the user's primary task.

AI search & discovery

Semantic, citation-grounded search across your content corpus.

Agents & autonomous workflows

Multi-step systems that complete operational work end to end.

Generative tools

Product features that produce content — text, image, code, structured data — on demand.

Embedded AI features

AI capabilities added to your existing product. Lowest scope, often highest impact.

Most AI apps are made of these building blocks.

A typical project picks 2–4 and combines them. We have dedicated pages on each.

Retrieval (RAG)

Grounds answers in your documents, with citations and evals.

Agents

Multi-step systems that use tools to complete work autonomously.

Private LLMs

Self-hosted models for sovereignty, compliance, or cost.

Workflow automation

Operational automations with humans in the loop.

Vector & search

Semantic search, hybrid retrieval, citation grounding.

Document intelligence

Parsing, OCR, extraction from messy real-world documents.

From idea to live AI app in six steps.

01

Discover

Use case audit, success criteria, model selection, build-vs-buy assessment.

02

Design

Architecture, data flow, UX, evaluation framework, security posture.

03

Prototype

Working spike on real data within 2–4 weeks. Validates the hardest unknown first.

04

Evaluate

Golden dataset, eval harness, A/B testing, human-in-the-loop QA.

05

Deploy

Production rollout with observability, rollback plan, monitoring dashboards.

06

Scale

Continuous optimization, fine-tuning, capability expansion, model migrations.

How AI application projects engage with us.

Discovery & Prototype
2–4 weeks
from $24,000
  • Use case audit + architecture
  • Working prototype on real data
  • Cost/timeline model + go/no-go
Start Discovery
Production Build
6–16 weeks
from $65,000
  • Full architecture across all layers
  • Eval harness + integrations
  • Phased rollout + 30-day support
Start a Build
AI Operations
monthly
from $11,500/mo
  • Quarterly model migration evals
  • Prompt + eval iterations + new capabilities
  • On-call + monthly reports
Discuss Operations

Common questions.

AI app vs. regular app with AI features?
An AI app's primary value comes from the AI — chat, generation, agents, search. A regular app with AI features has AI augmenting an existing workflow. AI-primary apps need bigger eval and observability investment.
Hosted models or private LLMs?
Mostly hosted to start — fastest path to validation. Move workloads to private LLMs when data sovereignty, cost at scale, or latency justify it, usually after 6–12 months.
How long does a build take?
Embedded feature: 4–8 weeks. Customer-facing product: 8–16 weeks. Multi-feature platform: 12–24 weeks.
Will I own the code?
Yes, 100%. Source in your repository, infrastructure in your cloud accounts.
How do you handle evals?
Every project gets a golden dataset scored on every release with LLM-as-judge plus structured assertions. Regression in CI blocks deploy.
What about hallucinations?
Depends on app type. RAG: citation grounding + verification. Agents: confidence thresholds + human-in-the-loop. Chat: refusal training + safety prompts + guardrails.

Tell us about the AI app you want to build.

A 30-minute call. We'll talk through what you're trying to accomplish, what's been tried, and what the right next step is — Discovery, Prototype, or straight to Production.