Most founders think they need to choose: build everything yourself or hire an expensive dev team. Hal9 offers something different.
We're a platform that helps startup founders launch AI-powered products in 30 days through a combination of managed onboarding and a self-service platform. Think of it as having a fractional co-founder who handles the hard parts while you stay in control.
Here's what usually happens when founders try to build AI products:
Full DIY: You use tools like Replit or Lovable to spin up a prototype. It looks great. Users can click around. But then you hit a wall—your backend isn't connected, your data isn't clean, and your AI logic doesn't actually work at scale. You've built a demo, not a product.
Full Build-Out: You hire a team of engineers or pay an agency $200K+ to build the "perfect" MVP with every feature you've imagined. Six months later, you launch... and discover users only care about 20% of what you built. You've spent too much time and money on the wrong things.
Both approaches fail for the same reason: you're either under-investing in the parts that matter (backend, infrastructure, AI integration) or over-investing in features nobody asked for.
Hal9 splits AI development into two parts that work together:
This is where our team acts like your fractional co-founder. We handle:
You get dedicated engineering hours each month (capped by your plan). We scope your MVP to the smallest version that delivers real value, then build it fast. Usually in 30 days.
Once your product is live, you can use our platform to:
The platform is model-agnostic—it works with every major LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.). You're not locked into any specific AI provider.
Let's say you're a founder who wants to build an AI tool that helps sales teams generate personalized outreach emails.
Month 1 - Managed Onboarding:
Month 2+ - Platform + Onboarding:
Starting price: $2K/month.
That includes both the managed service hours and platform access (compute, storage, LLM calls).
AI products are different from traditional SaaS.
With SaaS, you can prototype in Figma, validate with mockups, then build once you have customers. But with AI, users can't visualize what "smart recommendations" or "automated insights" actually feel like until the AI is working.
You need a real, functioning AI product to validate your idea—not wireframes or a UI prototype. And that requires actual backend work, data pipelines, and model integration from day one.
The problem is most founders don't have $200K to spend before knowing if anyone wants their product. That's where Hal9's incremental approach makes sense: spend $2K to validate the core workflow, then scale up the investment as you learn what works.
Use Hal9's Managed Service when:
Use Hal9's Platform (Self-Service) when:
Most of our customers use both. They lean on managed service to get past the hard parts, then use the platform for day-to-day iteration once the foundation is solid.
Not quite. Outsourcing usually means you hand off requirements and get a finished product months later. With Hal9, you're involved in every decision—we're working alongside you, not for you. Think fractional co-founder, not dev agency.
You own everything. All code, all infrastructure, all AI configurations. Hal9 uses standard open-source tools (Python, Docker, popular ML libraries), so any engineer can take over. There's no proprietary lock-in.
LLMs are amazing for prototyping and generating code snippets. But they can't set up your deployment pipeline, connect to production databases, handle security configs, or debug integration issues. Hal9 bridges that gap—we use AI tools ourselves, but we also bring the systems knowledge to make everything work in production.
Yes! We have a free tier for basic use cases (chat with CSV files, simple data apps). If you want to connect live databases or deploy custom AI workflows, you'll need a paid plan. The managed onboarding service is optional—you can upgrade to it anytime.
Hours reset monthly. If you consistently need more, you can upgrade to a higher plan. Or you can pause managed support and just use the platform until you hit something that needs expert help again. We're flexible.
Most AI platforms force you into one mode: either fully managed (expensive, slow) or fully self-service (you're on your own).
We built Hal9 because we kept seeing the same pattern with early-stage founders:
Hal9 lets you skip that painful middle part. You get expert help when you need it, and independence when you don't. You move fast without overspending, and you learn as you build instead of spending six months in a vacuum.
The goal isn't to do everything for you—it's to get you from zero to validated product as quickly as possible, then give you the tools to keep iterating on your own.
If you're trying to launch an AI product and you're stuck choosing between DIY chaos or expensive overkill, Hal9 might be the middle path you're looking for.
Book a strategy call with Hal9's founder Javier or check out our plans to see what fits your needs.