Onion Build

Consulting

What big companies pay a platform team for,without hiring one.

Practical AI and software for growing businesses. Plain answers about cost and privacy, and nothing you can't own.

AI is smart.It just doesn't know your business.

A second brain gathers what your company knows into one place, then gives AI assistants something real to answer from.

Scattered today

  • Docs & SOPs
  • Shared drives
  • Email & chat
  • People's heads

Second brain

One vault of plain files your team can read and edit

Custom assistants

  • Onboarding
  • Operations
  • Sales

GPTs, Claude projects or private agents

Faster onboardingNew hires stop interrupting seniors

Answers with sourcesEvery answer links its note

Knowledge you ownPlain files, no lock-in

Stop paying for AI seats nobody uses.

Which models, which plans, and how to keep cost and data under control. Then help running the rollout.

Where your AI runs

Privacy, intelligence and cost pull in different directions. Pick one to compare.

Privacy
Intelligence
Cost at high volume
Speed to start

Rule of thumb. Your data and usage decide the real answer.

Hybrid

Where most businesses land. Sensitive questions stay on private models, harder reasoning goes to frontier ones, and one second brain feeds both.

A local model for private data, a frontier model for everything else, routed automatically.

How you pay for it

Seat subscriptions

Cost as usage grows

Fixed per person, used or not

Best for: Everyday writing and research

Pay-per-use API

Cost as usage grows

Grows with every request

Best for: Custom assistants and automations

Model gateway

Cost as usage grows

Simple work routed to cheaper models

Best for: Many models, one point of control

Keeping it managed

Spend trackedPer team, per model

Data rulesWhat goes where

GuardrailsNo secrets in prompts

TrainingUse what you pay for

Shopify for small businesses.At home and abroad.

Get selling online, connected to the tools you already run. When you're ready for customers in other countries, the same setup grows with you.

What I set up

  1. StorefrontSet up fast, product copy drafted with AI
  2. PaymentsCards, local methods, sales tax
  3. InventorySynced with what you already use
  4. ShippingLocal, national, international
  5. SupportAI-assisted, in your customer's language

Stop renting software you could own.

Open-source foundations and AI-assisted development make owning a tool cheaper than it used to be.

Renting

  • Per-seat tool
  • Per-seat tool
  • Per-seat tool
  • Per-seat tool

Monthly fees per person, features you don't use, price hikes you can't control.

Owning

Your custom toolBuilt on open source, shaped around your workflow

Your data, no per-seat fees.

Who maintains it?Every tool ships with docs and either a maintenance plan or a handoff your team can run. And if a SaaS tool earns its price, I'll tell you to keep it.

How an engagement runs

  1. 1. Audit

    Tools, data, costs, pain points

  2. 2. Plan

    Build, buy, replace or leave

  3. 3. Build

    Small pieces, useful right away

  4. 4. Hand off

    Docs, training, you own it

Have a business question?

Tell me what's slow, costly or stuck. 30 minutes, no pitch.

Talk about my business