LADLE
Frontier-model chat, sold as a subscription.
live at ladle.chat
A chat product is easy to launch and hard to run. The work here was the unglamorous half: billing, accounts, history, and not paying frontier prices for trivial questions.
- timeline
- built and shipped in house
- services used
- Websites · AI Automation
stylized preview, not a screenshot
- step_01the challenge
A chat product is trivial to stand up and brutal to run. Margin dies if every message goes to the largest model, and the whole thing is worthless if billing, accounts, and conversation history are not solid.
- step_02what we engineered
We built it as a real product rather than a wrapper: accounts and conversation persistence, Stripe subscriptions, and a router that picks the model per query so routine questions do not get charged at frontier rates.
- step_03the outcome
The product runs live on its own domain with subscriptions, saved conversations, and per-query routing in production.
> // in depth
Anyone can put a text box in front of a model. The product only exists once subscriptions bill correctly, accounts survive, conversations persist, and the unit economics survive a user who sends four hundred messages in a weekend. That last one kills most of these products quietly, because every message routed to the biggest available model turns a subscription into a loss.
So the build is a real application: accounts and persisted conversations, Stripe subscriptions, and a router that chooses the model per query so routine turns are served cheaply and the hard ones still get the frontier model. It runs in production on its own domain.
> // how we work
A turnkey process, on a clock.
- 01discovery & strategyabout 1 week
We find the one action worth engineering around.
We map your buyer, your offer, and the single most valuable action. Everything downstream serves it. We agree on scope and a fixed launch date before any design begins.
- 02direction1 to 2 weeks
We prove the design before we build it.
Art direction benchmarked against luxury references, with type and motion proven up front so there are no surprises in the build. You see and sign off on the direction before a line of code.
- 03build & instrument2 to 4 weeks
We hand build it and wire the funnel.
Hand-coded Next.js, budgeted for speed, with the funnel instrumented and every state accessible and responsive. You review on a live staging URL at clear milestones.
- 04launch & careongoing
We launch, then stay to improve.
Managed edge hosting, a monthly report, unlimited edits, and continuous improvement. The launch is the start, not the end. We hand over everything you own.
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