Questions founders ask us.
Everything on automation, the audit, pricing, and how we build. If your question isn't here, a 30-minute call will answer it.
Automation audit & efficiency
What is the business automation audit?
A fixed one-week engagement where senior engineers map your operations, interview the people doing the work, and score every process on automation potential, effort, and ROI. You get a prioritized roadmap of what to automate first, what it costs, and what it saves.
What do we actually receive at the end of the audit?
A process map of your operations, an automation scorecard for each process, a prioritized roadmap with effort and ROI estimates, and a build plan for the top items. It's a document your team can execute with or without us.
How much time does the audit take from our team?
Around four to six hours total: a kickoff call, short interviews with the people closest to the manual work, and a findings walkthrough at the end of the week. We do the rest.
What kinds of processes can actually be automated?
The repetitive, rule-based work that eats hours: data entry between systems, document processing, reporting, customer-message triage, scheduling, invoice handling, and approval chains. If it follows a pattern, AI can usually take most of it.
Do we have to hire you to build what the audit finds?
No. The roadmap is yours and is written so any competent team can execute it. Most clients do keep us on — usually as forward deployed engineers building the highest-ROI items first — but there's no lock-in.
Is our data safe during the audit?
Yes. We're an EU-registered studio and GDPR-native by default. We work under NDA, access only what the audit needs, and EU data stays on EU infrastructure.
Working with us
Why hire you instead of an in-house AI engineer?
A senior AI hire takes months to find and costs six figures a year before they ship anything. We start this week, ship in weeks, and hand the work to your team. You get production results without the headcount risk.
Do you work with companies outside Europe?
Yes. We work with both US and EU companies. US teams come to us for senior engineering capacity; EU teams come for engineers who ship production AI with GDPR-native infrastructure by default.
What's the smallest engagement you take?
The automation audit is a clean entry point: one week, fixed price, a complete roadmap deliverable. From there most clients keep us on to build the highest-ROI automations.
Will you take over our whole product?
No. We embed, ship into your repo, and your team reviews every PR. You own the code, with no black boxes to inherit.
Who actually does the work?
Senior engineers only. The person who scopes your project is the person who ships it. No juniors learning on your budget.
Pricing & timelines
How do you price projects?
Fixed scope, fixed price. We define the deliverables and dates on the scoping call, then quote a flat number. No hourly billing and no scope creep.
How fast can you ship?
Typical feature cycles run under six weeks. The automation audit is one week from kickoff to roadmap handover.
Do you offer ongoing support after handover?
Yes. Your team owns the code, and we stay available for questions and the next piece of work. Most clients keep us on past the first engagement.
How we build
What's your stack?
TypeScript, Next.js, PostgreSQL with pgvector, AWS, and Resend, plus the major LLM providers including Claude and OpenAI. We build on your stack where you already work.
Which LLMs do you work with?
Claude, OpenAI, and others. We route models by task and cost, with evals so quality holds as the product changes.
Do you build RAG and agents?
Yes. Retrieval, agents, evals, and LLM ops in production. This is the work that took StudyFetch to more than 8M users.
How do you keep AI reliable at scale?
We treat AI as production software: evals, model routing, monitoring, and infrastructure that absorbs load spikes. We run 3.5M+ daily requests in production.
Is our data kept in the EU?
Yes, when you need it. We build EU-hosted data planes and compliant routing, with clean separation and no CLOUD Act exposure.
About VertCode
Where are you based?
Athens, Greece. The legal entity is Breukers Willem Albertus E.E. (trade name VertCode Development), registered at Valaoritou 1, TK 10671. GEMI 186520701000, VAT 802973201, Tax Office KEFODE Attikis.
What is VertCode?
An EU-registered AI engineering studio providing forward deployed engineers, business automation audits, and production LLM systems for US and EU companies.
What have you built?
StudyFetch, scaled to 8M+ users; Analyse, our own analytics product on analyse.net and games.analyse.net; Honen; and HodosOps, our own GDPR-native field-service product.
How do we get started?
Book a 30-minute scoping call. We map your AI touchpoints and tell you what to build first and what it costs.
Still have a question?
A 30-minute call answers it faster than any page. We'll tell you exactly what you need and what it costs.