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For agencies, dev shops & fractional CTOs

Your clients are asking for AI. Say yes.

I build retrieval and LLM systems under your brand, on your timeline, invoiced to you. Your client never learns my name unless you want them to. You keep the relationship, the margin and the credit.

See rates & terms How the split works
Fully white-label I never approach your clients Fixed-scope quotes, not hourly guessing Scoping call free, always
The division of labour

You stay in front. I stay behind the curtain.

Every engagement runs on the same split. It exists so nobody has to negotiate the boundary mid-project.

You Client-facing
  • Own the relationshipEvery conversation, every meeting, every invoice to the client.
  • Set the priceYou quote whatever your market bears. My number is a cost line, not a floor.
  • Handle discoveryYou know your client's business. I'll give you the technical questions to ask.
  • Present the workI write the deck content and the plain-English explanations. You deliver them.
  • Take the creditIt shipped under your name because your team shipped it.
Me Never client-facing
  • Scope the technical workFree scoping call with you, then a fixed-price quote you can mark up.
  • Build the systemRetrieval, evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, deployment. In your client's infrastructure.
  • Write the documentationHandover docs and runbook, styled for your brand or unbranded.
  • Brief your teamSo your account lead can answer client questions without calling me.
  • Stay invisibleNo logos, no case study, no mention anywhere unless you offer it.

If you'd rather I join the client call, I will — as your engineer, with your email address, using your company name. Some agencies prefer that for technical credibility. It's your call every time, and the default is that I'm not there.

The maths

Turning down AI work is more expensive than subcontracting it

Most agencies I speak to have already lost a project this year because they couldn't staff it. Usually to a competitor who subcontracted.

01

Hiring is a bad bet at this size

A senior AI engineer is $150k+ fully loaded, three months to hire, and you need consistent pipeline to justify the seat. Two projects a year doesn't get you there.

02

Your existing devs will learn it slowly and expensively

They can absolutely learn this. On a client project, on a deadline, is the worst place to do it — the mistakes are subtle and don't show up until production.

03

Saying no puts the whole account at risk

The agency that says "we don't do that" invites another agency into the relationship. That one then asks what else they can help with.

04

It's the highest-margin work on your rate card

Clients have budget for AI and few reference points for pricing it. Even at a healthy markup on my cost, the margin usually beats your standard build work.

Typical deals

Three shapes that come up most, and how they price

Illustrative structures, not quoted results. Your price is whatever your market bears — the point is what's left after my cost.

"Can you make our help centre actually answer questions?"

The most common request by a distance. Retrieval over the client's documentation, policies and past tickets, delivered either as suggested replies inside their helpdesk or as a search layer on their site.

Three to four weeks. I build it, you present it. Comes with an evaluation set so you can show the client a measured accuracy number rather than a demo — which is usually what wins the follow-on work.

Illustrative economics
Your client price$28,000
My fixed quote$11,500
You keep$16,500

Plus whatever you bill for discovery, design and project management — which is yours entirely.

"We need to get documents into the system automatically"

Invoices, contracts, forms, applications — extracted into structured records with validation, confidence scoring per field, and an exception queue for anything uncertain rather than a silent guess.

Usually the easiest of the three to scope precisely, because the success criteria are unambiguous. Two to five weeks depending on document variety.

Illustrative economics
Your client price$22,000
My fixed quote$9,000
You keep$13,000

These often turn into retainers once the client sees the exception queue shrink.

"Our client's AI project has stalled and we've inherited it"

Someone built a demo, it impressed everyone, and now nobody can make it reliable. I audit what exists, tell you honestly whether to fix or restart, and then do whichever it is.

Awkward work, but agencies who handle it well tend to own that account for years. I'll give you a straight assessment even when the answer is "this needs rebuilding" — better you deliver that news early than defend someone else's prototype.

Illustrative economics
Audit — your price$6,000
My fixed quote$2,500
You keep$3,500

Audit alone. The rebuild that usually follows prices like the first two rows.

Rates

Three ways to buy, all of them fixed before we start

Partner rates, published. You need to be able to quote your client the same day they ask, not after a week of back and forth.

Scoping

You've got a client conversation happening and need a number.

Free

Same-day turnaround where I can

  • 45-minute call with you, not the client
  • Fixed-price quote you can mark up
  • The technical questions to ask in discovery
  • An honest "don't bid on this" when that's the answer
Book a scoping call
Most partners Fixed-scope project

A defined build, quoted up front, delivered to your deadline.

$8k – $22k

Typical range · quoted per project

  • Price fixed before work starts, no change requests
  • Evaluation set so you can show measured results
  • Documentation in your brand or unbranded
  • Weekly written update you can forward to the client
  • 30 days of fixes after handover, included
Get a quote
Retained capacity

You have steady flow and want me reserved rather than queued.

$5,800/mo

~40 hours · 30 days notice

  • Reserved capacity across your accounts
  • Priority over project work
  • In your Slack, same-day replies
  • Unused hours roll one month
  • Your devs can pair with me at no extra cost
Talk about capacity

On markup, plainly

Partners typically bill their clients two to three times my quote, and that's the arrangement working as intended. You carry the sales cost, the client relationship, the project management and the commercial risk. That's worth real money and it's yours.

I'll never tell a client what you paid me, and I'd rather you didn't tell me what you charged them. Both of those make the relationship simpler.

Model and infrastructure costs sit in your client's own accounts and are billed to them directly. I don't resell them and neither should you — it's a support burden with no margin in it.

Ground rules

Five commitments that make this safe for you

Subcontracting only works if the subcontractor can't become a competitor. So here's that in writing.

I will never approach your client

Not during the project, not after it, not in two years when they post a job. Contractual non-solicit, and frankly the entire business model collapses the first time I break it.

Your name goes on everything

Code comments, documentation, commit messages, the deck. Nothing I produce identifies me unless you ask it to. If your client audits the repo, they see your agency.

I'll tell you not to bid

When a project won't work — bad data, impossible expectations, a client who wants magic — I'll say so during scoping, for free. You lose a bid you'd have lost anyway, six months later and much louder.

Fixed price means fixed price

If I've underestimated, that's mine to absorb. The only thing that changes a quote is you changing the scope, and then we agree a new number before anything happens.

Your team can learn from it

If your developers want to pair, read the code, or take it over entirely, that's included and encouraged. The goal is that you need me for the next hard thing, not for maintaining the last one.

Partner questions

What agency owners ask me

What if my client wants to meet the engineer?

Then I'll be on the call as part of your team, with your email address and your company name. Plenty of agencies prefer this — a technical person in the room closes more deals than a slide about capability.

What I won't do is take a meeting your client arranges directly with me. Everything routes through you.

How fast can you turn a quote around?

Usually same day if you can get me a description of the problem and rough scale — how many documents, what the process is, what "correct" would look like. A 45-minute call gets it done properly.

I know agency sales runs on speed. A quote that arrives after the client has cooled off is worth nothing.

What happens if the client hates it?

Structurally, that's unlikely to be a surprise — the evaluation set means you're showing measured accuracy at week two, not revealing everything at the end. Bad news arrives early, when it's still fixable.

If a build genuinely misses the agreed criteria, I fix it at my cost. Thirty days of fixes are included after handover regardless.

Can you work inside our process and tools?

Yes — your Jira or Linear, your repo conventions, your branch strategy, your standups if you want me there. I've spent most of my career joining existing teams and codebases; adapting to yours is normal work, not an accommodation.

What I'll push back on is skipping evaluation. That's not process preference, it's the thing that keeps your client happy in month six.

Do you work with our competitors?

Possibly, and I'll tell you if it's a direct conflict on a specific account. What I won't do is share anything between partners — no code, no approaches developed for you, no client information.

If you want genuine exclusivity in a niche, that's a conversation. It costs more, because it means turning down work.

What's your capacity actually like?

Two active projects at a time, plus retained partners who get priority. When I'm full I'll tell you the date I'm free rather than taking it on and delivering late — a subcontractor who overcommits damages your client relationship, not mine.

This is the honest weakness of working with an individual, and it's why the retained option exists.

Why should we trust one person with a client account?

You shouldn't, blindly. Start with something small and low-risk — an audit, a scoping exercise, a contained build on a forgiving account. Judge the work, then decide whether to put me near a bigger one.

Everything I build runs in your client's infrastructure with documentation written as it ships, so if I vanish tomorrow your team has what it needs. That's a lower concentration risk than most agencies carry on their own senior staff.

Who you'd be subcontracting

Eight years of production systems, including inside agencies

I'm Bahman Shadmehr. I've spent most of my career on backend systems where quiet failure was expensive — automated trading platforms on the Texas power market, a national payment gateway I helped break out of its monolith, and the Kubernetes infrastructure underneath both.

I've also worked the agency side of e-commerce: Shopify integration microservices at Vgang, a hosted store builder at Pyango. I know what a client-facing delivery schedule feels like, and what it costs you when a subcontractor misses one.

That's why this page is mostly about boundaries and fixed prices rather than technology. The engineering is the easy part of subcontracting. Predictability is the hard part.

2024 — 2025Automated energy trading, ERCOT — order pipeline, monitoring, alerting
2023 — 2024US equities trading platform — AWS services on the trading path
2022 — 2023Vgang — Shopify integration microservices, Kubernetes platform
2021 — 2022Pyango — hosted e-commerce store builder, Django and Vue
2020 — 2021Zibal — payment gateway, monolith to microservices

Python, Go, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis. Remote, UTC+3 — European hours and US mornings. 76 posts on DEV · LinkedIn

Next step

Got a client asking for something you can't build yet?

Send me the request in whatever form you have it — a forwarded email is fine. I'll come back with a fixed number and an honest read on whether it's worth bidding.

info@bshadmehr.me
Book a free scoping call

Two projects at a time Quotes usually same day NDA signed before anything

Useful in a first message

  1. What the client asked for, in their words.
  2. Their industry and rough size.
  3. Where their information lives — docs, tickets, a database.
  4. Your deadline, and whether you've quoted yet.
  5. Whether you want me on the client call or not.