# 2 Acre Studios, Full Site Content

> Pittsburgh tech shop since 2010. Websites, SEO, automation, customer-service tools, and AI when it actually fits. Senior people only, no junior labor. Serving Pittsburgh + Western Pennsylvania small and mid-sized businesses.

## Identity

- **Legal name:** 2 Acre Studios
- **Founded:** 2010
- **Headquarters:** Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA (40.4406° N, 79.9959° W)
- **Service area:** Pittsburgh metro, Allegheny County, Western Pennsylvania, plus remote work across North America
- **Phone (intake / assessment line):** (412) 998-1370, six-minute phone assessment with written report by email in 10 minutes
- **Phone (founder direct):** (412) 407-6170
- **Email:** marc@2acrestudios.com
- **Website:** https://2acrestudios.com
- **Slogan:** Pittsburgh tech help for the things that should just work.

## Team

### Marc Shade, Founder
Building software for businesses since 1997. Twenty years shipping production work for Fortune 500 clients (Kellogg's, Hertz, Stryker, ConAgra) through Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide. Founded 2 Acre Studios in 2010 as a Pittsburgh dev shop. Pivoted to AI engineering in 2023. 60+ open-source repositories. ARC-AGI-3 competitor. The person you talk to is the person writing the code.

- GitHub: https://github.com/marc-shade
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcshade

### Scott Frederick Laughlin, Co-founder
Cloud architect and AI/ML engineer. A decade of pioneering AI SaaS, IoT solutions, and multi-cloud infrastructure. Founder of TechRamp. Led high-impact engineering for Fortune 500 enterprises.

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-engineer-inventor

## What we actually fix

Most weeks the work is more boring than AI. We fix what's slowing your business down, sometimes that means a smarter tool, sometimes a better website, sometimes (less often than you'd think) AI.

### 1. Websites that work and show up on Google
Your site hasn't been touched since 2018, you've stopped getting calls from search, and the form does not work on a phone. We rebuild it in two to four weeks and set up the search side so it actually shows up. Then we leave you with something you can update yourself.

### 2. Phones and customer service that handle themselves
Calls ringing all day with the same five questions. After-hours messages piling up. We set up a system that answers the easy ones, escalates the real ones, and emails your team a clean log every morning. Your customers stop waiting; your team stops repeating themselves.

### 3. Automation for the busywork
Your team is copying numbers between two systems every Friday. Or chasing approvals through email threads. Or printing things to scan and re-enter. We connect the systems so the work just stops happening. The first one usually pays for itself in a month.

### 4. AI when it earns its place
Smart search through years of files. Customer questions answered overnight. First-draft contracts your team edits instead of writes from scratch. We use AI when it solves a real problem, not when it makes a good headline. Your data stays put on your servers, nothing leaves the building unless you say it can.

## Who we work with

Pittsburgh small and mid-sized businesses. 20 to 250 employees. $5M to $75M revenue. The owner, managing partner, or COO signs the check. No procurement committee. Ready to start in 14 days, not six months. Working tools beat slide decks.

### Best-fit industries
- **Law firms**, 10 to 150 attorneys. Associates buried in document review. Partners want the firm to stop being the slow one. Client material can't go anywhere off the firm's servers. See: [law firm offering](https://2acrestudios.com/law/).
- **Healthcare practices and specialty groups**, charts, prior-auth, intake, all eating staff hours. Patient information has to stay where it should.
- **Accounting and CPA firms**, tax-season document work pulling everyone under, client confidentiality blocking the off-the-shelf tools the national firms use.
- **Manufacturers, contractors, and insurance agencies**, decades of records nobody can search, retiring senior people taking the last copy of how things work with them.

## Three free ways to start

Pick the one that fits how you work.

### Path A, Five-Minute Self-Assessment (online, instant)
Eight quick questions about your business. Where the team's time is going, what's been on your list, what's broken. Submit, and a written look at three things you could fix this quarter loads on screen. The full report lands in your inbox shortly after, with rough effort on each fix.

- URL: https://2acrestudios.com/self-assessment/
- Cost: free
- Duration: 5 minutes
- Deliverable: instant on-screen snapshot + written report by email

### Path B, Six-Minute Phone Assessment (call now, report in 10)
Call **(412) 998-1370** any time. We listen, take notes, and write up the same report after we hang up. No survey, no script. Email lands in ten minutes with three things you could fix and what each would take.

- Phone: (412) 998-1370
- Cost: free
- Duration: 6 minutes on the phone, report in your inbox 10 minutes later
- Deliverable: written report by email

### Path C, Thirty Minutes with the Founder (video or phone, same week)
Book directly on Marc's calendar. We talk about your business, what's actually eating the team's day, and what we'd do about it. Marc writes the report from your conversation and sends it the next morning. No pitch, no junior staff, no follow-up unless you ask.

- URL: https://calendly.com/marc-shade/one-on-one
- Cost: free
- Duration: 30 minutes
- Deliverable: written report by email the next morning

## Engagement tiers (after the free assessment)

### The Assessment, $1,995 fixed fee, 1-week delivery
The diagnostic step between the free intake paths and any engagement tier. A 45-minute discovery call, a written 12-page punch list naming the four AI tools your business should install this week (with monthly cost, setup time, and hours saved per tool), a 30-minute walkthrough, and a 5-hours-per-week-back-or-refund guarantee. The deliverable includes an effort-versus-impact 2×2, a 4-day implementation plan, a Monthly Net ROI figure in dollars, and a data-handling note per tool. URL: https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-audit/ · Sample report: https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-audit/sample-report/

### Foundation Monthly Retainer, $4,500 / month
20 hours per month. Whatever your business actually needs in tech, we work on. Walk anytime if we don't ship.

### Two-Week Deep Discovery, $7,500 fixed fee
Two weeks. We go deeper into your business, assess what's there, and ship a working prototype on your own systems. Refund if it fails your security review.

### Proof of Concept, $25,000 to $60,000 fixed fee
Four to six weeks. Scoped proof-of-concept on a single well-defined use case. Real data, real integrations, runs on your infrastructure. Includes evaluation harness and a go/no-go decision framework.

### Production Build, $75,000+ milestone-based
Eight to sixteen weeks. Hardened, assessed, deployed, and supported for thirty days post-launch.

## Pittsburgh law firm offering (dedicated page)

For Pittsburgh-area law firms with 10–150 attorneys we offer a single monthly retainer that covers IT support, websites, automation, training, and smarter tools when they fit. Client material stays on your firm's servers. Free 30-minute assessment.

- **Starter Retainer**, $1,250/mo, 5 hours per month, focused pilot
- **Foundation Retainer**, $5,000/mo, 20 hours (most firms start here)
- **Growth Retainer**, $10,000/mo, 40 hours, multi-practice scope

See: https://2acrestudios.com/law/

## Deep-dive service pages

### Services
- [Local AI Deployment Services](https://2acrestudios.com/services/local-ai-deployment/), On-premise LLM systems, no data egress
- [Multi-Agent System Development](https://2acrestudios.com/services/multi-agent-systems/), AutoGen, CrewAI, with guardrails
- [RAG Pipeline Development](https://2acrestudios.com/services/rag-pipelines/), Citation-backed answers across your documents
- [Document Intelligence](https://2acrestudios.com/services/document-intelligence/), Searchable knowledge base from PDFs, Office files, email
- [Customer Support AI](https://2acrestudios.com/services/customer-support-ai/), $0.50/interaction, 65% Tier-1 automation
- [Sales Enablement AI](https://2acrestudios.com/services/sales-enablement-ai/), Proposal generation, lead scoring
- [Free AI Readiness Assessment](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-readiness-assessment/), 30 minutes, no pitch
- [The Assessment](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-audit/), $1,995 fixed fee, 12-page punch list, 5-hours-back guarantee ([sample deliverable](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-audit/sample-report/))

### Industry-specific landing pages
- [AI for healthcare (HIPAA-aware)](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/healthcare/)
- [AI for financial services](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/finance/)
- [AI for legal firms](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/legal/)
- [AI for manufacturing](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/manufacturing/)

### Local / geo landing page
- [Pittsburgh AI consulting](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-ai-consulting/), Pittsburgh-based AI consulting and development for Western Pennsylvania organizations

### Reference guides
- [Local LLM hardware guide](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/local-llm-hardware/), GPU sizing for 7B–70B models
- [RAG vs fine-tuning](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/rag-vs-fine-tuning/), When to retrieve, when to train
- [Ollama vs vLLM](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/ollama-vs-vllm/), Inference engine comparison

## The harness, how we actually deliver this work

The hard part of AI isn't the AI. It's everything you build around it.

Most AI shops sell you an integration. Wire a chatbot to your support queue, pipe ChatGPT into your inbox, demo it on a Tuesday, call it done. The demo runs. The production system breaks the first time a customer asks a question the model hadn't seen. You're left wondering whose number to call.

That's not what we ship. Every system we put in your business sits inside a harness, the same kind of harness senior software teams have always built around anything that's expensive when it fails. It's what twenty-nine years of building software for hospitals, contractors, education companies, and Fortune 500 clients quietly turned into. AI just made the harness necessary even for small jobs.

Eight components, organized along the system lifecycle:

**Before the system runs:**

1. **Workflow design.** Which decisions belong to the model. Which stay with a human. Where the handoffs are. What "done" actually means. Every step gets an owner, an input, an output. Most AI projects skip this and ship a model bolted to a tool with no workflow definition behind it. They break the same way every time. *Prevents: shipping a model without a workflow behind it.*

**While the system runs:**

2. **Guard rails.** Ninety-seven automated checks that run before and after every action the AI takes (verified count from our reference harness). They catch hallucinated facts, blocked file paths, injected prompts, off-policy commands, and silent failures the model would otherwise hide under polished-sounding language. *Prevents: AI confidently saying "done" when it isn't.*

3. **Verification gates.** Every output is run end-to-end against the real path. Unit tests pass is not the same as the system works. "Should work" is never a load-bearing claim. The harness names one thing not verified in every report so you know exactly what's been checked and what hasn't. *Prevents: demo theater. Code that looks right but breaks in production.*

4. **Structured memory.** Persistent, queryable, decay-aware. Not a chat history. What worked, what didn't, who your clients are, what your team named the thing, the constraints you mentioned in passing six months ago. Survives across sessions, across people, across models. *Prevents: repeating the same explanation every week.*

5. **Decision log.** Every decision the system makes is logged and timestamped. If something goes wrong on a Tuesday at 2:47 PM, we can show you the exact input, the exact output, what the system was asked to consider, and what it chose to do. Required for healthcare. Required for finance. Required by us regardless. *Prevents: "we have no idea why it did that."*

6. **Rollback.** Every change is committed to version control. Every deployment is checkpointed. Every autonomous decision is reversible. The system has kill switches, file integrity monitors, HALT files, three autonomy tiers from "propose only" up to "act freely within bounds." You're never one bad day away from a rebuild. *Prevents: the AI making a confident change you can't get back.*

7. **Specialized sub-agent review.** Twenty-six specialized roles, code reviewer, security checker, debugger, testing, architecture, performance, each with their own narrow remit. The proposer doesn't approve its own work. The reviewer doesn't know the proposer's reasoning. Disagreement surfaces. Single-model overconfidence doesn't. *Prevents: one model talking itself into a bad call.*

**After you've signed off:**

8. **Ongoing ownership.** Who keeps the system tuned after launch. What docs you have. What metrics get watched. How a recovery looks the first time something genuinely goes sideways. We don't ship a system and ghost, but the system also can't depend on us being there. It has to belong to your people the day after launch. *Prevents: a "production" system that decays into nobody's-job.*

The AI projects you've heard about that "didn't go anywhere" almost always failed in the same place, not on the model, on what wasn't built around the model. That's where your money actually goes. The harness is the difference between a chatbot you can't trust and a system you can. Even OpenAI's own Frontier Alliances post now argues the enterprise AI bottleneck is the implementation layer, not the model.

Full long-form essay: https://2acrestudios.com/insights/the-harness-is-where-value-lives/

## How we're different

- **The harness (above).** Most AI shops sell the integration. We sell the system around the integration. That's what makes the difference between a Tuesday demo and a Tuesday production.
- **Senior people only.** No junior labor. No offshoring. No handoff chain. The people you talk to are the people writing the code.
- **Pittsburgh-based, on-site available.** For Western PA clients we come on-site for hardware installation, stakeholder discovery, executive presentations, and go-live without additional travel billing.
- **Working tools beat slide decks.** Engagements ship code in days and weeks. The first automation usually pays for itself in a month.
- **Data sovereignty by default.** For regulated industries (law, healthcare, finance) we deploy on your own infrastructure, Ollama-based local LLMs, on-premise document intelligence, so client material never leaves your firewall.
- **No follow-up sequence.** No drip campaign. No pitch deck. If we're not the right fit, the report says so.

## What your free report contains

Every recommendation is matched to your business, your team, and your timeline. Every fix has an estimated time saved or money saved. Every recommendation includes a one-paragraph implementation sketch you can hand to anyone, us or someone else. If we're not the right fit, the report says so.

Sample fix shown on the homepage:
- Name: Smart lookup across your case files
- Time saved: ~6 hours / week
- Effort to set up: Low
- Where it runs: On your servers
- Data security: Stays put
- Recommended tier: Foundation · $4,500/mo

## Privacy

This site uses Ahrefs Web Analytics for traffic measurement only. No retargeting, no marketing pixels, no email harvesting, no data sold to third parties. Your assessment answers stay between you and Marc. They are used to write your report, not stored after delivery, not shared, not used to train anything.

## Frequently asked questions

### What does 2 Acre Studios do?
2 Acre Studios is a Pittsburgh tech shop. We fix what's actually slowing your business down, websites that should show up on Google but don't, customer-service systems that ring all day with the same five questions, automation for busywork your team is doing by hand, and AI when it earns its place. Senior people only, no junior labor. Founded 2010.

### Where is 2 Acre Studios located?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We serve small and mid-sized businesses across Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania, and clients across North America. For Pittsburgh-area clients we come on-site for hardware installation, stakeholder discovery, and go-live without additional travel billing.

### Who is 2 Acre Studios a good fit for?
Pittsburgh small and mid-sized businesses, 20 to 250 employees, $5M to $75M revenue, where the owner, managing partner, or COO signs the check and there is no procurement committee. We do particularly good work with law firms (10–150 attorneys), healthcare practices and specialty groups, accounting and CPA firms, manufacturers, contractors, and insurance agencies. Best fit: you're ready to start in 14 days, not six months.

### How much does 2 Acre Studios cost?
Three ways in are free: the five-minute self-assessment, a six-minute phone assessment at (412) 998-1370, and a 30-minute call with founder Marc Shade. One paid diagnostic sits between free and full engagement: The Assessment at $1,995, a fixed-fee 1-week deliverable with a 5-hours-per-week-back-or-refund guarantee. Then the four engagement tiers: Foundation Retainer at $4,500/mo for 20 hours; Two-Week Deep Discovery at $7,500 fixed; Proof of Concept at $25,000 to $60,000 over 4–6 weeks; Production Build from $75,000 over 8–16 weeks.

### Do you offer free consultations or assessments?
Yes, three of them. (1) A free 5-minute online self-assessment that produces an instant snapshot and a written report by email. (2) A free 6-minute phone assessment at (412) 998-1370; same questions, written report by email in 10 minutes. (3) A free 30-minute call with founder Marc Shade where Marc writes the report from your conversation. No deck, no follow-up sequence, no pitch.

### Do you do AI consulting, or just AI?
Both, but most weeks the work is more boring than AI. We fix websites that don't show up on Google, set up phone and customer-service systems that handle the same five questions automatically, and automate the busywork your team is copying between two systems every Friday. AI gets used when it earns its place, smart search across years of files, first-draft contracts, after-hours customer questions, not when it makes a good headline.

### What makes you different from other AI shops?
The harness. Most AI shops sell you an integration, wire ChatGPT to your inbox, hook a chatbot to your support queue, demo runs, production breaks. We build the eight-part system around the AI, organized along the system lifecycle: workflow design, guard rails, verification gates, structured memory, decision log, rollback, specialized sub-agent review, ongoing ownership. Even OpenAI's own Frontier Alliances post now argues the enterprise AI bottleneck isn't the model, it's how agents are built and operated inside the company. Full breakdown in the section "The harness, how we actually deliver this work" above, and the longer argument at https://2acrestudios.com/insights/the-harness-is-where-value-lives/

### Can my data stay on our own servers?
Yes. For law firms, healthcare practices, CPA firms and any other organization where client material can't leave the building, we deploy systems on your own infrastructure, Ollama-based local LLMs, on-premise document intelligence, customer-support AI that never touches a third-party cloud. Your data stays put. Nothing leaves the building unless you say it can.

### How quickly can you start?
Standard local AI deployment is production-ready in 2–4 weeks. Website rebuilds run 2–4 weeks. A working prototype on your systems via the Two-Week Deep Discovery is 14 days. Foundation retainer engagements start immediately.

### Who actually does the work?
Marc Shade (founder, shipping software since 1997, Fortune 500 clients via Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide) and Scott Frederick Laughlin (cloud architect, AI/ML engineer). The people you talk to are the people writing the code. No junior labor. No offshoring. No handoff chain.

### How do I get in touch?
- Call (412) 998-1370 for the six-minute phone assessment
- Call (412) 407-6170 to reach Marc directly
- Email marc@2acrestudios.com
- Take the 5-minute self-assessment: https://2acrestudios.com/self-assessment/
- Book 30 minutes on Marc's calendar: https://calendly.com/marc-shade/one-on-one

### Do you do work outside Pittsburgh?
Yes, most of our delivery work is remote and clients are spread across North America. The "Pittsburgh" framing is about where we're based and where we can show up in person. For remote clients, the engagement model is the same minus the on-site visits.

## Social / open-source presence

- **GitHub (Marc):** https://github.com/marc-shade, 60+ open-source repositories, 624 stars
- **GitHub (org):** https://github.com/2acrestudios
- **LinkedIn (company):** https://linkedin.com/company/2-acre-studios
- **LinkedIn (Marc):** https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcshade
- **LinkedIn (Scott):** https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-engineer-inventor
- **Discord:** https://discord.gg/9DvzfsrYFA

## Agent-readable files

- `/llms.txt`, summary for AI discovery (llmstxt.org spec)
- `/llms-full.txt`, complete site content as markdown (you are here)
- `/agent.json`, structured data payload (JSON)
- `/sitemap.xml`, sitemap with image extensions
- `/.well-known/llms.txt`, well-known mirror

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*2 Acre Studios / Pittsburgh, PA / Est. 2010*
*Built with code. Senior people only. Working tools, not slide decks.*
*Ahrefs Web Analytics for traffic measurement only. No retargeting, no marketing pixels, no email harvesting.*

*Last updated: 2026-05-15*