Phase 5: a real product

The last era is the least visible and the most grown-up: turning a working app into something you can responsibly charge strangers for. “Polish” grew into a full launch gate with three tracks.

Being trustworthy. If people give you their thoughts, you owe them boring diligence: their data survives a disaster (encrypted database backups every six hours to European storage, with a restore actually rehearsed on a separate machine; a backup you’ve never restored is a hope, not a backup); the system tells me when it’s failing (error tracking and uptime monitoring, including a hand-rolled, privacy-scrubbed error client); there’s a rehearsal environment so deploys aren’t performed live (a staging server mirroring production); and a safety catch makes certain developer shortcuts impossible to run in production (a fail-closed boot check that closed a real impersonation hole).

Being compliant. The unglamorous paperwork made real: public terms and privacy pages, a register of every third-party service that touches data, and the two GDPR rights that matter, download everything you’ve ever put in and delete your account completely (the deletion path verified in a live drill, not assumed).

Being viable. AI answers cost money on every call, so the margin work: routing each kind of request to the cheapest model that does it well (per-category routing, roughly 65% cheaper on the benchmark, quality scored by an LLM judge rather than by hope).

What it left behind. Billing went live, the cost routing was switched on in production, and the phase closed. Then a full security audit landed on top of it and turned “polish” into a phase of its own (auth and session integrity, secret handling, real authentication between the services), the kind of list that is uncomfortable to read and much better read before strangers are paying you than after. The full launch-readiness page has the detail.

Next era: The beta: first contact