GEOSLN is a small consulting practice: you work directly with me, Kevin Mercy, an experienced software engineer. This post explains how an engagement works, start to finish, so you know what you're booking before you book it.
Who this is for
Small and mid-size private companies with a data, GIS or production-software problem and no specialist on staff to solve it. Typical teams:
- Environmental and engineering consultancies with spreadsheets, Shapefiles and desktop GIS workflows that have outgrown one person's laptop.
- PropTech and insurance-adjacent startups that need geospatial data in their product.
- Small software teams with a prototype (often built quickly with AI tools) that now must run in production.
So far, GEOSLN has mainly supported small businesses: automating processes they already had, or that were slow, and taking several organizations from idea to MVP.
It starts with a free 30-minute call
Book a time and come prepared with the issues or problems your organization is struggling with: a repo, a dataset, a failing job, a map, or just a description. On the call I ask about your data, your stack, your team and what "done" looks like. The more tangible information we can discuss, the easier it is to quote your project.
We follow up with our retainer and/or audit recommendation shortly after the call.
Our business model
| Offer | Standard | Founding clients | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feature Retainer | $1,800 | $1,440 | Advice, reviews, focused fixes, a small feature |
| Build Retainer | $5,600 | $4,480 | A real build: a pipeline, an API, dev to prod, a prototype rescue |
| Technical Audit | Quoted after the call | - | A human-readable, prioritized review you can take direct action on |
Retainers are priced by the work, not the clock. Each one is a fixed price for a scope we agree in writing before anything starts, so you know the budget up front, there's no long contract, and work starts as soon as the retainer is paid. If plans change, you don't lose what you paid: the unused part carries over to the next piece of work, a different retainer, or an audit. More traditional hour-based contracts are reserved for larger or bulk projects, by agreement after the call.
Founding-client pricing is 20% off the standard rate for our first five clients. It's a launch offer, not a permanent discount.
Bigger builds get a fixed quote after the call, with a written scope.
What our technical audit includes
An audit is for teams that want an experienced outside review before they spend on a build. It's a fixed fee, quoted after the call because it depends on the size of the system. It covers:
- A kick-off call, then read-only access to your repo, cloud and CI.
- A map of the architecture and data flow, with where it fits and where it stops scaling.
- Code quality: tests, linting, duplication and dependency health.
- Security: common web application risks, secret protection, best authentication practices, vulnerable dependencies, and headers.
- Infrastructure and delivery: CI/CD, environments, backups, monitoring and cloud cost.
- GIS and data, when relevant: pipelines, spatial indexes, projections, formats and tiles.
- A risk check on code written quickly with AI tools.
- A written report: findings ranked by severity, effort estimates, a 30/60/90-day roadmap and a walkthrough call.
How I use AI coding agents, and where I don't
I use AI coding agents every day. They write and refactor code faster than I can type it, and that saving goes to you. What they don't do is decide what ships. On every engagement:
- Every change is reviewed by me before it's proposed to you, the same way I'd review a junior engineer's pull request.
- Every change is tested and verified in a throwaway environment before it touches yours.
- Your secrets and data never go into a prompt. Credentials stay in your secret store; sample data is synthetic or cleared with you first.
- Small, reviewable changes instead of one giant AI-generated rewrite.
This is how GEOSLN's own Hazard API is built and run in production, with CI, tests and a reviewed deploy for every change.
What you get at hand-off
- Code in your repository, with tests and CI.
- Docs and runbooks your team can follow without us.
- A short summary of what changed, what's left and what I'd do next.
No black box, and no dependency on us to keep it running.
Contracts and payment
Every engagement has a simple written agreement covering scope, confidentiality, and ownership of the work. Retainers and audits are paid in advance through a Stripe or Relay payment link.
Next step
If any of this sounds like your problem, book a free 30-minute call. If you'd rather write first, send a short note.