AI Platform, Prototype to Production – Confidential Startup

Our client — a consumer AI startup we can't name publicly — is building a discovery product for high-consideration purchases: a user searches a company, service or category, and the platform runs live AI web search over public signals and returns explainable, personalised scoring.

The problem was the classic AI-product gap. The product existed as a feature-complete prototype — a single-file React app that demonstrated the full UX but had no real backend: no authentication, no persistence, no live AI, no billing. A convincing demo that could not be put in front of real users.

What we built — TechChaps led the productionisation with a ground-up production architecture that preserved the validated UX:

• Production frontend in SvelteKit with hybrid rendering — static marketing pages, server-rendered public pages for SEO, and a client app shell for the authenticated experience
• Real authentication: server-side sessions, hardened password handling, email verification and password reset
• PostgreSQL data layer with a typed ORM — user state that survives devices and sessions
• Live AI search via a server-side proxy to a web-grounded AI API, with response caching, cost controls and a graceful fallback when the AI is unavailable
• Stripe subscription billing with trial logic and webhook-driven entitlements
• A multi-component weighted scoring engine and affiliate click-tracking infrastructure

The result: in under two weeks the prototype became a deployable production application — real accounts, persisted user state, live web-grounded AI answers and working subscription billing, staged for stakeholder demo and launch. The difference between an AI demo and an AI product is exactly this unglamorous layer, and it is the layer TechChaps ships.