Ethos PowerFlagship engagement
The whole system, end-to-end
Not a website, not a single app — the entire operational system that runs a part of your business, designed and built as one coherent whole. Self-hosted, owned by you, and built to last.
Book a 20-min callYou've outgrown bolting tools together
Most businesses run on a patchwork: a CRM here, a spreadsheet there, an inbox quietly doing the work no software was bought for. Each tool is fine on its own — but the system between them is held together by people copying data from one place to another.
A platform replaces that patchwork with one coherent system: capture, processing, storage, and action, all connected. I design it around how your operation actually runs, build it on open foundations, and hand you something you own outright — no per-seat fees, no vendor holding your data hostage.
Sound familiar?
- •The same data lives in four places and none of them agree.
- •Work only moves when a person remembers to move it.
- •You're paying per-seat for tools that still don't talk to each other.
- •The thing that runs your business is really a spreadsheet and someone's memory.
Live example · Self-hosted knowledge base
Decades of engineering knowledge, searchable — and private
An engineering consultancy held decades of reports and design documents, and wanted its people to search that archive with AI — without exposing proprietary knowledge to cloud models or anyone outside the firm. I built a self-hosted RAG knowledge base with enterprise document management, end-to-end encryption, and complete data sovereignty. The archive stays on their infrastructure, and so does every query.
Ingest
Decades of reports, drawings, and design documents are loaded in — no reformatting, no manual tagging.
Understand
A self-hosted model reads, chunks, and embeds each document, so the system grasps meaning, not just keywords.
Index
Everything is stored in a private vector index and document store the organisation owns outright.
Retrieve
A question pulls back the most relevant passages from across the entire archive in seconds.
Answer
A self-hosted language model drafts a grounded answer with its sources cited — nothing ever leaves their infrastructure.
Fully self-hosted, end-to-end encrypted. Every document, every query, and the language model itself stay on infrastructure the organisation controls — so proprietary knowledge is searchable to the people who should see it, and invisible to everyone else.
What a platform includes
The layers vary by what your business does — but a platform always joins them into one system instead of a pile of disconnected tools.
Data capture
The front door: voice, text, forms, uploads, or integrations with the tools your work already flows through.
An AI processing layer
Transcription, extraction, classification, and drafting — the work that used to need a person reading everything by hand.
A knowledge store
A knowledge graph and vector search so the system can recall anything by meaning, not just exact-match keywords.
Operational records
A CRM or domain database that holds the structured truth — customers, jobs, assets, commitments — one source everyone trusts.
Automation & follow-up
The system acts: drafts replies, raises tasks, triggers the next step, and chases what would otherwise be forgotten.
Self-hosted infrastructure
It all runs on infrastructure you control — your cloud or your hardware. Your data stays yours, end to end.
Built to own, not to rent
A platform is too important to your business to sit behind someone else's subscription. Everything I build is yours.
You own the code
Full source, in your repository. Keep me on to evolve it, or hand it to any other engineer — your choice.
Self-hosted by default
Runs on your own cloud or hardware. Your data never depends on a third party staying in business.
Open foundations
Standard open-source building blocks — no proprietary platform you can be locked into or priced out of.
Built to extend
Designed in clear layers, so the next capability is an addition — not a rebuild from scratch.
How I work with you
A platform is a serious build, so I do it in stages — you see working software early and steer as it takes shape.
Discovery & architecture
I map how your operation really runs, agree what the system must do, and design the layers — capture, processing, storage, action — before a line of production code.
Build in stages
I build one working slice at a time — end-to-end, not half-finished pieces — so you can use it and shape it as it grows, not just review it at the end.
Run & evolve
Once it's live I keep it running and growing — new capabilities, model refreshes, scaling — or hand over cleanly to your own team. The system stays yours throughout.
Pricing
Scoped to your system
Every platform is different, so I scope each one to what it has to do. We start with a paid discovery and architecture phase to size the build precisely — no open-ended estimates, no surprises.
All prices in USD (converted from NZD), exclusive of GST. Advisory rate: $129/hr.
A platform doesn't replace the people who run your business — it takes the manual relay-race off their plate, so their judgement goes into the work that actually needs it.
Ready to build the thing that runs your business?
Tell me what your operation does and where the patchwork is hurting, and I'll sketch what a single, owned system could look like for you.