AI infrastructure & unit economics · independent consulting
Nobody owns a cost they can’t see.
I’m Tim Urista. By day I’m a Senior Cloud Engineer at Apple, working on private cloud for internal AI workloads. Independently, I help teams attribute their AI spend, cut the waste, and ship more with less using AI-assisted delivery that’s scoped, reviewed, and verified before it ships.
Cash-pay · advisory from $250/hr · fixed-price sprints & audits
Receipts, not slides
Line items from my own stack
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TrendVesting
phantom trade rows caught by an audit
9,655
-
TendForm
HIPAA tier, verified live before launch
$49/mo
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TigerMill
first 8 image-model calls
≈ $1.00
-
Roku
AWS spend attributed per quarter
$10–12M
Unit that matters
$ per accepted output
Cloud spend attributed
$10–12M/qtr
Cost-attribution pipeline at Roku; co-led the ECS→Kubernetes migration.
Fleet under attribution
~700K servers
Financial attribution where quiet misattribution warps budgets by millions.
Production AI
2.5 years
TrendVesting has run since Feb 2024, on an invoice I pay myself.
Overconfidence caught
54.7 pts
How far TrendVesting’s stated confidence ran above its real win rate, until I measured it.
What I do
Spend less on AI. Get more out of it.
Three kinds of work, one discipline: measure the unit that matters, then change the system until the number moves.
01 · Attribute
Find out what your AI actually costs
Per request, per customer, per accepted output. Map spend to owners so someone can act on it, then rank the waste by dollars.
Learn more →02 · Manage
Ship faster with AI without shipping worse
Scoped work, review gates, tests, and verified-live checks that catch what fast delivery breaks. The same process I run on my own products.
Learn more →03 · Rebuild lean
Replace the expensive thing with a smaller one
Websites and internal tools rebuilt AI-native: less code, lower run cost, and a deploy pipeline you own.
Learn more →New series · Human in the Loop
What the commit history actually says
Field notes on managing AI-assisted software delivery: how I scope the work, what I check before anything ships, and the bugs that got through anyway.
- Part 1
Sep 13, 2026 · 11 min · TendForm
TendForm: managing a solo SaaS build to production quality
How I scoped, reviewed and validated a HIPAA-capable form builder I built alone: the rules I wrote down, the checks I trusted, the 14 bugs that got through anyway, and the process I'd change.
- Part 2
Sep 13, 2026 · 11 min · TrendVesting
TrendVesting: validating 2.5 years of production AI
How I review and validate an AI trading system I own: change records with production numbers, invariant tests, reconciliation audits and calibration checks, and the numbers they overturned.
- Part 3
Sep 13, 2026 · 11 min · TigerMill
TigerMill: quality gates for an AI content pipeline
How I defined acceptance for a novel-to-webtoon pipeline: a gate after every stage, approvals that name who made them, spend behind a human trigger, and tests that guard the defects I already paid for once.
Case studies
Costs, at every scale
From quarterly cloud bills in the millions to the dollar a side project spends on image models.
My own practice · 2025–2026
4 checks
between a proposed change and production
How I manage AI-assisted delivery without losing quality
The operating model behind three products I build and run solo: scoped work, gates with attribution, no spend in the toolbelt, verification before anything ships, and a written record of every decision.
Read case →TendForm · Jun–Sep 2026
11 wks
first commit to a HIPAA-capable SaaS
A HIPAA-capable SaaS, shipped solo, priced against its own cost stack
A form builder with multi-form packets, a markdown DSL, a 27-tool MCP server, and a HIPAA tier, built and run solo in 11 weeks. The cost decisions and the verification habits mattered as much as the code.
Read case →TrendVesting · Feb 2024–present
+54.7 pts
stated confidence above the realized win rate
When cheap measurement overturned 2.5 years of beliefs about an AI product
A production AI signals platform I've run since February 2024. When I required every change to show its measurements, the numbers said the confidence scores meant nothing. That's the most valuable finding of the whole project.
Read case →TigerMill · Sep 2026
≈ $1
for the first 8 measured image-model calls
An AI content factory in 33 hours, and the metric that actually matters
A webtoon production pipeline with five gated stages, built over a weekend with acceptance rules written before any output was judged. Image generation is cheap per call; what it costs per accepted panel is the number nobody tracks.
Read case →Try it
AI cost teardown
Describe a workload in a sentence. Get a monthly estimate, a unit cost, and the levers, the way I’d sketch it on a first call.
Estimates from a language model. Useful for orientation, not a quote.
AI Cost Teardown
Describe an AI or cloud workload in plain English. You'll get a fully-loaded monthly estimate, a per-unit cost, and the highest-leverage ways to cut it. Live, powered by Claude.
Rates
Published prices. Cash-pay.
Invoiced directly, paid by ACH or card. No platforms or agencies in the middle.
Advisory hours
$250/hr
2-hour minimum
Executive Cost Briefing
$2,500
90 minutes
Unit Economics Sprint
from $5,000
1 day
AI Cost & Unit Economics Audit
$12k–$25k
1–2 weeks
ML Cost & Reliability Evals
$15k–$30k
2 weeks
AI-native rebuild
Fixed quote
After a Sprint