Frequently asked questions
Straight answers about what Neolen does, what it deliberately doesn't, and what an engagement looks like.
Neolen does one thing: we take apps built with AI, make them production-grade, and keep them running. We don't sell software, seats, or credits — we sell the work. You arrive with a half-working app and a business that needs it to work; we take the engineering problem off your hands and give back a system you can run on.
That's exactly who this is for. Our clients are non-technical founders and small business owners who have already built and shipped something — you have users or customers, and you've hit a wall you can feel but can't name. You don't need to be able to describe the problem in technical terms. Send us the app; diagnosing it is our job, not yours.
The usual signs around week three: the schema needs to change but there's live customer data in it; login works but authorisation was never actually enforced at the database level; API keys are sitting in the client bundle; payments were wired for a demo and nothing reconciles; there are no migrations, backups, staging environment, or rollback path; the AI's fixes look correct but break something else; hosting or AI usage costs are climbing; or you need to be on the App Store and there's no path to get there.
Every engagement begins with a fixed-fee intake audit: a structured assessment of your application's security posture, data integrity, authorisation model, integration health, cost profile, and deployment maturity. You receive a plain-language report of what is actually wrong, ranked by risk — and it's yours to keep whether or not you continue. The audit is deliberately low-commitment: immediate value, and the qualification step for everything after it.
Three stages. The audit is a fixed fee. The hardening engagement is fixed-price and fixed-scope, priced from the audit findings, so you know the number before work starts. The operations retainer is a monthly relationship covering monitoring, incident response, changes, and continued development. We price against what you're actually comparing us to — an agency quote or the cost of a bad hire — not against builder subscriptions, which solve a different problem at a different stage.
No. We don't do rebuild proposals, and we don't rebuild working systems in a different framework. The point of Neolen is that what you built is worth keeping — it needs hardening, not replacing. If something genuinely must be replaced (a payment flow that can't reconcile, for example), we swap in a verified module that has already survived production, and the audit will have told you exactly why.
Anything generated by a mainstream AI app builder. In practice that's a small, predictable set of stacks: React and TypeScript, Supabase or Postgres, and a handful of hosting targets. If you're not sure what yours is, that's fine — tell us which tool you used and we'll know. The narrowness is deliberate: because the input repeats, the failures repeat, and we've built automated detection and known-good fixes for the ones we've already seen. We don't take on work outside AI-built apps.
Both, under a standing rule: the machine proposes, the engineer decides and signs. Agents run the intake audit and draft the mechanical portions of hardening work — migrations, validation layers, test coverage — under engineer review. Engineers own diagnosis, architectural judgement, anything touching live customer data, and every decision that carries consequence. That division is not negotiated per engagement.
Data safety is the reason most clients come to us, and it's treated accordingly. Schema changes and migrations against live data are engineer-owned, executed with backups and rollback procedures in place, and verified before and after. One of the first things the audit checks is whether you currently have working backups at all — most AI-built apps don't.
Everything. The hardened system runs on infrastructure you own, and you receive the repository, CI, environments, and documentation in a state a future engineer can pick up. From there you choose: a clean handover, or an operations retainer where Neolen stays the single accountable party for the software continuing to work. You're never left with a tool to learn or a repository you're expected to maintain alone.
Yes. For clients who need to be on mobile, we handle native shells, store submission, and the release process — one of the most common walls for apps that started life as an AI-generated web app.
Yes. The team behind Neolen has shipped and operated 20+ production applications for international clients over 7+ years — including PawPurrfect, Bloom Cap, GetBoarded, Pacome, estart4, Videowiki, Trusted Predictions, Fan Fury, and Mic Monster. Taking software the last mile to production, and keeping it there, is the muscle this service is built on. The case studies page walks through the work.