PoC Software Development Services

Overview

You should not spend six months and half a million dollars building a product before you know whether the core technology works.

Our PoC software development services exist to answer one question fast: is the riskiest technical assumption in your plan actually true? We build lean proofs of concept designed to produce a defensible yes or no, and we design them to be cheap to throw away.

A PoC has to be able to fail

This is the part most agencies quietly avoid, because a PoC that returns "no" feels like a failed engagement. It is the opposite. A no in four weeks for $40k is the most valuable outcome we can sell you, because the alternative is finding out in month nine.

So before we write code, we agree in writing on two things:

• The single question. Not "build a prototype." Something falsifiable: can we extract structured line items from our supplier invoices at over 95% field accuracy? Can this run inside our latency budget at ten times current volume? Will this model stay within an acceptable cost per transaction?
• The kill criterion. The specific measured result at which the honest recommendation is to stop. Written down before we start, when nobody is emotionally invested in the answer.

If a vendor will not write down a kill criterion with you, they are not selling you a proof of concept. They are selling you the first invoice of a longer project.

What we deliberately leave out

A PoC is defined by its exclusions, and being explicit about them is what keeps it to weeks rather than months. Unless one of these is the risk being tested, we skip: authentication and user management, admin interfaces, billing, onboarding flows, comprehensive error handling, horizontal scaling, and design polish beyond what is needed to demonstrate the thing.

We also do not write the PoC to production standards, and we say so plainly. Proof-of-concept code is disposable by design, and pretending otherwise is how a PoC quietly becomes a production system nobody chose to build. When the answer is yes, we hand you a build plan for the real system, informed by everything the PoC taught us. Some of the code may carry over. The architecture decisions definitely will.

Where PoCs earn their cost

AI and model feasibility. Can a model do this reliably enough on your data? This is now the most common PoC we run, and the most necessary, because a demo on curated examples tells you almost nothing about behaviour on the real distribution. We build a real eval set from your data and report measured accuracy, not a compelling demo.

Unit economics. The system works, but does it work at a price that leaves a business? For AI features this is frequently the binding constraint rather than capability. We measure cost per transaction at realistic volume and model the curve as usage grows, including what happens if you need a frontier model such as Claude Opus 5 rather than a cheaper one like Claude Sonnet 5 or Claude Haiku 4.5 to hit your quality bar.

Integration risk. Will the vendor API, legacy system, or hardware actually do what its documentation claims? Documentation is aspirational surprisingly often, and finding the gap early is worth the whole engagement.

Performance and scale. Does the approach hold at the volume you expect in year two, or does it fall over at 3x current load?

Timeline and cost

Most PoCs run two to five weeks. We quote a fixed price against the written question and kill criterion before starting, and we bill for the engagement, not for a result that flatters the plan. If we reach a confident answer in three weeks instead of five, the engagement ends in three weeks.

You get the code, the eval data, the measurements, and a written recommendation with our actual opinion in it, including when that opinion is that you should not build this.

What happens next

If the answer is yes, we can build the production system, or hand the whole package to your in-house team, or to another vendor. We do not make the PoC dependent on us continuing. The point of the exercise is to give you a decision you can defend to your board, and a decision you can only act on by hiring us again is not that.

Related reading: what it costs to build a custom AI agent, and the AI readiness checklist we run before shipping.

Stop debating whether it will work. Let's find out.