We build software that compounds.
AppRiddle is an enterprise engineering consultancy. Senior engineers who go deep on architecture, so the second release costs less than the first and the tenth still ships in days — across enterprise applications, AI systems, and cloud platforms.
Every engagement includes
- A written decision record for every consequential choice
- Working software in production — not a prototype
- Runbooks, tests, and pairing from week one
- Senior engineers from the first call to handover
Fixed scope. Fixed price. No bench to keep busy.
- No pyramid
- The engineers who scope the work are the engineers who build it.
- Fixed scope
- Priced and bounded before we start, not reconciled after.
- Handover by default
- Runbooks, decision records, and pairing from week one.
We think most software is bought as a project and inherited as a liability. Everything about how we work is an argument against that.
How we build it
Three architectures we bring into new engagements, each written up in full — schema, code, failure modes, and the trade-offs we would argue about.
- AI systems
Contract intelligence platform
Hybrid retrieval over a high-volume document corpus, with citation-grounded generation and a review queue for anything under the confidence threshold.
- Retrieval
- Hybrid
- Grounding
- Cited
- Pilot
- 6–8 wks
- Cloud platform
Multi-region platform, staged
Four stages from single-AZ to active-active, each one removing a named failure mode. Most teams should stop at stage two, and we will say so.
- Stages
- Four
- IaC
- Terraform
- Pilot
- 8–12 wks
- Custom development
Multi-tenant SaaS foundation
Tenancy and isolation model, SSO with role-based access, metering hooks, and an audit log — the work that has to exist before feature delivery gets predictable.
- Isolation
- RLS
- Access
- SSO + RBAC
- MVP
- 12–16 wks
Applied engineering research
Whitepapers and technical guides published in full — schemas, working configuration, measured trade-offs, and the failure modes each decision is designed against.
- Whitepaper22 min read
Cloud observability: instrument everything, keep almost none of it
The three questions an on-call engineer actually needs answered, the signals that answer them, and why your bill is set by cardinality and retention rather than traffic. With Collector config, burn-rate alerts, and list prices from six platforms.
- Observability
- OpenTelemetry
- Whitepaper17 min read
Multi-tenant foundations: the work before the feature work
Tenancy model, row-level isolation, SSO and RBAC, metering, and an audit log that survives examination — with the migrations, the connection-pool trap that defeats RLS, and the test that tries to leak.
- Multi-tenancy
- PostgreSQL
- Technical guide16 min read
A staged path to multi-region on AWS
Four stages, each removing one named failure mode, with the RTO and RPO each one actually buys. Most teams should stop at stage two — here is how to tell whether you are one of them.
- AWS
- Resilience
Start with the smallest useful thing
A two-week architecture review costs a fixed fee and ends in a document you own. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is in the document too.
What happens next
- A 45-minute call with the engineer who would lead the work
- A one-page scope and fixed price within the week
- No procurement theatre and no bench to keep busy