Product studio · Fractional CTO · Content engine

Apps that ship
Sites that perform

The Notus is a product studio. We design, build, and ship software: our own products and yours. Bring an idea, a prototype, or the build you're stuck on, and we take it to production, with real auth, real payments, real AI engineering, and a codebase you own. Engineering, brand, and content under one roof.

We've shipped four products end-to-end. Two are our own, built on our own money: Song Cage, a songwriting app on web, iOS, Android, and inside DAWs, and The Curious Thing, which turns a photo of your kid into a printed fantasy jigsaw. Two were built for client founders, taken from an AI-generated starting point to production. Your project gets the same standard: real auth, real payments, AI pipelines that hold, the security passes no AI tool runs for you, and a codebase a second developer can actually maintain. Song Cage launched to 92 signups in its first month with zero ad spend. Fixed scope, fixed price, you own the code outright. No retainer, no platform subscription, no hourly billing from us.

4
Products shipped end-to-enddesigned, engineered, launched by us
2
Our own products, liveSong Cage · The Curious Thing
5
Days: idea to paid pipelineThe Curious Thing · live and shipping
001
Apps to Production
002
Custom Sites & Rebuilds
003
Content Engine
004
Brand & Design
Apps that ship · Sites that perform Four products shipped end-to-end Two of them our own · live · taking orders Idea, prototype, or stuck build → production Webflow & WordPress to custom code Real auth · real payments · real AI Content engine · video · social · blog Song Cage · cited by ChatGPT · 7 days Apps that ship · Sites that perform Four products shipped end-to-end Two of them our own · live · taking orders Idea, prototype, or stuck build → production Webflow & WordPress to custom code Real auth · real payments · real AI Content engine · video · social · blog Song Cage · cited by ChatGPT · 7 days
001 / What We Do

What does The Notus actually do?

Apps to production · Custom sites · Content engine · Brand
001

Apps to Production

Bring an idea, a prototype, or an AI build that mostly works. Notus takes the fractional CTO seat, designs and builds what's missing, and ships it: real auth, real payments, real database design, AI calls that don't burn your runway, performance, and the security passes no AI tool runs for you. You ship to real users. You own the code.

  • From idea, from prototype, or from a stuck build: Lovable, Cursor, Claude, Bolt, Replit, v0, Windsurf
  • Auth, payments, webhooks, idempotency, all hardened
  • AI pipelines that don't crash and don't bleed cost
  • Native iOS / Android via Capacitor if you need it
From $7,500 · 3–4 weeks · fixed scope
002

Custom Sites & Rebuilds

A custom website redesign, or a brand-new site from scratch. Our in-house team handles brand, design, and engineering. Webflow, WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix get migrated to custom code you actually own. Then we set you up to keep editing it yourself by talking to Claude or Cursor, with guardrails so nothing in production breaks while you do.

  • Brand-new builds with full brand & design from our team
  • Webflow, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix migrated to custom Astro on Cloudflare
  • AI-editable handoff: CLAUDE.md, preview deploys, one-click rollback, plain-English training
  • Structured so ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI can read you
  • 95+ Lighthouse · no platform fees from us · you own everything
From $4,000 · productized
The proof: we ship our own products first

Song Cage and The Curious Thing. Ours, built the way we build yours.

Song Cage is our own songwriting app, designed and built from a blank file: one React codebase shipped to web, iOS, Android, and inside DAWs. The Curious Thing turns a photo of your kid into a printed fantasy jigsaw, from AI portrait to doorstep. Every standard we sell runs on our own products daily, where we can't blame anyone else.

See the case studies →
003

Brand & Design

Logo, colour system, typography, brand guide. Standalone if you only need brand work, or bundled into any site or app build. Designers, not auto-generators.

From $800
004

AI Engineering Specialty

Most dev shops bolt on Stripe and call it done. We've shipped real AI in production: Groq, OpenAI, Replicate, Parallel AI, BM25 search, vector retrieval, multi-model pipelines that don't crash and don't bleed cost.

Included where it matters
005

Content Engine

Once it's shipped, we take it further. A done-for-you engine built on your real product: demo video, social across up to nine channels, and blog posts engineered to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. We run it daily on our own products. See the content engine →

Build from $2,900 · run from $1,200/mo
Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem Keep a calm mind when things are difficult Horace · Odes II.3
002 / The Difference

Why hire the studio that ships its own products?

Verifiable work, not a logo wall
01
The claim everyone makes

Every agency says they can build it

Portfolios full of logos you can't verify. Case studies with no live product behind them. Code written by rotating contractors you'll never meet. By the time you find out what a team can actually ship, you've already paid for the answer.

02
The Notus way

We ship our own products, on our own money

Song Cage and The Curious Thing are ours: designed, engineered, launched, and run by the same hands that build client work. When we say real auth, real payments, and AI pipelines that hold, you don't have to take it on faith. Sign up and check.

03
The result

Products that ship, then get used

The same standard runs through client work: Cardify went from a founder idea to a live marketplace, Pulse from a Google AI Studio shell to a 15-worker production system. Real products, in production, with real users, not demos that fall over the first time someone hits them.

Song Cage: blank file → three platforms → shipped and live.

003 / The Work

Four products shipped. Two of them ours.

Song Cage · The Curious Thing · Cardify · Pulse
Song Cage songwriting app — DAW-style timeline canvas with Am, C, D, F chord blocks, "There is a house in New Orleans / They call the Rising Sun" lyrics laid on the beat, and the Word Tools panel showing rhymes for "boy" grouped by syllable count (coy, joy, troy, employ, enjoy, destroy, hoi polloi, corduroy, attaboy, capital of Illinois)
Our own product

Song Cage

Our songwriting app, designed and built from a blank file: one React codebase shipped to web, iOS, Android, and inside DAWs. Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for its category within seven days of launch, with zero ad spend.

92
Signups · month one · zero ads
7
Days from launch to first AI citation
Read the case study →
The Curious Thing personalized puzzle site — "Your kid. But make them a cowboy." hero with two AI fantasy portraits rendered as jigsaw puzzles: a girl as a princess outside a castle and a toddler cowboy beside a horse
Our own product

The Curious Thing

Personalized photo puzzles for kids: a parent uploads a photo, our AI repaints their kid as the star of a fantasy world, and a premium jigsaw prints and ships. First commit to live paid pipeline in five days.

Read the case study →
Cardify trading card platform — "Create Epic Trading Cards" hero over a grid of AI-generated card artwork, with Generate Card CTA, Buy Credits, Upload Designs, and Browse Marketplace tiles
Client build

Cardify

An AI trading-card platform built for its founders from an idea: a custom multi-model image pipeline, a 3D card-slab viewer, a full creator marketplace, and Stripe plus crypto payments.

Read the case study →

Also shipped: Pulse. A client build taken from a Google AI Studio shell to a 15-worker production system across 107 topic verticals. Its founder paused the product in mid-2026 to refocus on his core business; the system ran unattended for the six months before that.

All four case studies →
004 / The Principal

You hire the person who writes the code

Principal-led · no account managers · no hand-offs
Steve Canfield, Founder and Principal Engineer of The Notus
Founder & Principal Engineer · Your fractional CTO

Steve Canfield

When you hire The Notus for engineering, you hire me. I read your codebase, make the architecture calls, and write the code that ships. I've designed and shipped four products end-to-end, two of them my own (Song Cage and The Curious Thing, both live and taking orders) and two for client founders (Cardify and Pulse), taken from an AI-generated starting point to production. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it, on the other end of every call.

005 / How It Works

How does The Notus work with clients?

Apps or sites: same process, same standards
01

Free written estimate

Send us your repo, your live demo, your AI-tool project link, or just the idea. We read it, run it, and send back a written estimate within 48 hours: what's in scope, what's risky, what it takes to ship. Free. No call required.


You get a real engineer's read on your codebase.

02

We design, build, and ship it

Fixed scope, fixed price. App side: auth, payments, real database, AI pipelines that hold, performance, security. Site side: brand, design, custom code, AI-legible markup. The same standards we hold our own products to. We share progress weekly and hand back code you actually own.


3–4 weeks for prototype-to-production. 2–3 weeks for sites. 6–12 weeks for full builds.

03

Launch, and it's yours

You get the code, not a login to our platform. Sites ship with an AI-editable handoff, so you keep editing yourself by talking to Claude or Cursor. Clean markup, schema, and llms.txt are baked in, so AI tools can read the site too. Add the content engine later if you want more reach. Or don't.


You own the code outright. No platform lock-in, no retainer.

006 / Services

Two pillars · Fixed scope · You own the code

One bill, then it's yours. We are not a retainer.
Pillar one · Fractional CTO

Apps to Production

From $7,500 · 3–4 weeks

Bring an idea, a prototype, or an AI build that mostly works. Notus takes the fractional CTO seat, designs and builds what's missing, and ships it to real users. Fixed scope, fixed price. You own the code outright. No platform lock-in, no SaaS subscription to us.


Pillar two · Website redesign

Custom Sites & Rebuilds

From $4,000 · productized

A custom website redesign, or a brand-new site from scratch. Our in-house team handles brand, design, and engineering. Then we set you up to keep editing the site yourself by talking to Claude or Cursor, with the guardrails that make it safe to do so on a live business. Every page also ships as clean, fast, standards-based markup that people and AI tools alike can read.


Why this works

"It's hard to pay a dev agency for two weeks of work knowing I already built most of it in a weekend."

We hear this. So we don't charge for what AI already did, and we don't charge for what a template builder already gave you either. We charge a fixed price for the part neither of them could do. We've shipped four of these end-to-end, twice on our own money.

Also available

Brand & Design

From $800

Standalone brand work if you only need a logo, palette, and brand guide. Or bundled into any site or app build. Same designers, same standards.


Greenfield builds

Custom App From Scratch

Quoted per scope · typically $25K+

No prototype yet. You have an idea and validated demand, not code. We design and build the whole product end-to-end, including the AI engineering most rescue shops can't deliver.


Take it further · flagship add-on

Content Engine

Build from $2,900 · then from $1,200 / mo

Once your product ships, we run the content operation that gets it found: demo video made from your real interface, social across up to nine channels with verified delivery, and blog posts engineered to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.


Not sure what you need?

Send us the repo, the URL, or just the idea. We'll tell you exactly what it takes. Free, in 48 hours.

Starting from scratch, holding a prototype, stuck mid-build, or escaping Webflow. We'll send back a written estimate either way.

Common platforms we move people off
Webflow Custom Astro on Cloudflare
WordPress Custom Astro on Cloudflare
Squarespace Custom Astro on Cloudflare
Wix Custom Astro on Cloudflare

Same shop migrates them all. No monthly platform fees from us. You own the code, and it stays editable by you and Claude after launch without a developer on retainer.

007 / Who We Help

Founders with ideas. Builders mid-flight. Operators ready to ship.

Wherever you're starting from, one shop takes it to production
Apps

You have
an idea

Validated demand, no code yet. We design and build the whole product end-to-end, brand included. It's how our own products started.

Apps

You have
a prototype

Lovable, Cursor, Claude, or Bolt got you most of the way. We finish the auth, payments, security, and AI-cost work and ship it to real users.

Sites

Outgrown Webflow
or WordPress

Your site fought you for the last time. We migrate to custom Astro on Cloudflare, then set you up to edit it yourself by talking to Claude. Fast, clean, yours.

Sites

Need a real
brand-new site

No site, or one that no longer fits. Our team handles brand, design, and engineering. One bill, one team, one timeline.

You're a good fit if
  • You have an idea, a prototype, or a site that's holding you back
  • You want a fixed price, scoped build. Not a retainer, not hourly
  • You'd rather own clean custom code than rent it from a platform
  • You want brand, design, and engineering from one team, not three vendors
  • You're ready for AI tools to actually be able to find you
Not sure where you fit?

Send us what you have: repo, URL, or just the idea. Free 48-hour written estimate either way.

App side, site side, both. We'll tell you what it takes. No call required.

008 / FAQ

Plain answers. No jargon.

Questions founders ask us every week

Yes. That's one of our two main service lines. Send us a repo link or a deployed URL, and we'll read it, run it, and send back a written estimate within 48 hours: what's in scope, what's risky, what it'll take to finish. The estimate is free.

Yes, this is the other half of what we do. We rebuild your site in custom Astro on Cloudflare, with brand, design, and AI-legible markup baked in. You keep your content and your domain; you lose the monthly platform fees and the template constraints. Every migration ships with an AI-editable handoff so you can keep updating the site yourself by talking to Claude or Cursor after we hand it back. Start at $4,000, productized.

Yes, and this is the part most agencies skip. Webflow and WordPress can't be safely edited by AI tools today: Webflow has no API for agents, WordPress hides content in serialized database blobs that page builders own. A custom Astro site is the opposite. Claude Code and Cursor can read the whole codebase, understand the design system, and ship changes through plain English. We set you up to do that safely. The handoff includes a project-tuned CLAUDE.md that tells Claude what your brand rules, components, and no-touch zones are; Claude Code hooks that run lint and tests on every change; preview URLs on every edit so you see the change before it goes live; one-click rollback when something does go wrong; and a 60-minute walkthrough so you know exactly how to prompt for edits. Founders are typing things like 'add a testimonial section under the pricing block' and shipping it themselves, same day, without us in the loop.

Both. Our in-house team handles brand, identity, and visual design, standalone if you only need brand work (from $800), or bundled into any site or app build. We don't subcontract this to anyone.

Yes, and it's the best proof we can offer. Two of the four products we've shipped are our own, built on our own money and live today: Song Cage, a songwriting app on web, iOS, Android, and inside DAWs, and The Curious Thing, which turns a photo of your kid into a printed fantasy jigsaw puzzle. Client work gets the same architecture, the same security passes, and the same production standards we run on our own products. You don't have to take our standards on faith; you can sign up and check.

Three things. First: we ship our own products (Song Cage, The Curious Thing), not just client work, so we know what production actually demands and you can verify us by using them. Second: most shops bolt on Stripe and call it done. We've shipped real AI engineering (Groq, OpenAI, Replicate, BM25 search, multi-model pipelines, real audio/3D/payments work). Third: you own everything outright and can keep editing it yourself with Claude or Cursor after we hand it off, and every build ships clean enough for AI tools to read too. We charge for production and real AI engineering, and you can verify all of it by using our own products.

Yes, fixed. After the free estimate we send a scope and a number. That number doesn't change unless you ask for new scope. If we find the codebase is in worse shape than the estimate suggested, that's on us, not you. We'd rather lose money on one project than turn into the surprise-invoice agency. We've shipped enough of these to scope accurately.

We don't guarantee specific rankings. Nobody controls AI tools from the outside. What we can say: every site we build is structured the right way (schema, llms.txt, AI-legible markup), and Song Cage went from launch to cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude in seven days with no paid media. We'll be honest up front about realistic expectations for your specific market.

Prototype-to-production work runs 3–4 weeks. Larger rebuilds or full custom builds run 6–12 weeks. Marketing sites ship in 2–3 weeks. We'll agree on the timeline before we start, and you review and approve work weekly, so you're never surprised at launch.

Take It to Production starts at $7,500 and runs to ~$15,000 for tougher rebuilds. Full custom SaaS builds are quoted per scope, typically $25K and up. The custom marketing site is $4,000 fixed, productized. The content engine builds from $2,900 and runs from $1,200/month; a blog-only retainer is $400/month flat. Brand design starts at $800. You own everything outright. No SaaS subscriptions, no platform lock-in, no ongoing fees from us.

No. You tell us what the product is meant to do and where you're stuck. We handle the code, the infrastructure, the AI work, the hosting, the security. All of it. Your job is to review what we ship and approve it. That's it.

Generally no. We take cash so we can stay independent and keep our quality bar high. If you have a genuinely exceptional product and want to talk about a small equity component on top of cash, we'll consider it case by case.

009 / Free Estimate

Send us your project. We'll tell you exactly what it takes.

Written estimate in 48 hours · App or site · No call required
Send your
project
Get an
estimate
4
Products shipped end-to-end
48h
To written estimate
$0
For the estimate

Send a repo link, your current site URL, or just describe what you have. We read it, run it, and send back a written estimate: what's in scope, what's risky, what it'll take to ship (app or site). Free. No call required.

48-hour written estimate · No sales pressure · Honest results