# 2 Acre Studios

> Pittsburgh tech shop since 2010. Websites, SEO, automation, customer-service tools, and AI when it actually fits. Senior people only, no junior labor. Serving small and mid-sized Pittsburgh businesses, law firms, healthcare practices, CPA firms, manufacturers, contractors, and insurance agencies.

## Quick facts
- **Name:** 2 Acre Studios
- **Founded:** 2010
- **Based in:** Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
- **Service area:** Pittsburgh + Western Pennsylvania + remote across North America
- **Team:** Marc Shade (Founder, shipping software since 1997), Scott Frederick Laughlin (Co-founder, cloud architect / AI ML engineer)
- **Phone (intake / assessment line):** (412) 998-1370
- **Phone (founder direct):** (412) 407-6170
- **Email:** marc@2acrestudios.com
- **Website:** https://2acrestudios.com

## What we do
We fix what's actually slowing your business down. Four categories of work:

1. **Websites that work and show up on Google.** Rebuild stale sites in 2–4 weeks, set up SEO that actually ranks, hand off something the team can update themselves.
2. **Phones and customer service that handle themselves.** Systems that answer the easy questions, escalate the real ones, and email a clean daily log.
3. **Automation for the busywork.** Connect the two systems your bookkeeper is copying numbers between every Friday. Typically pays for itself in a month.
4. **AI when it earns its place.** Smart search across years of files, first-draft contracts, after-hours customer answers, when AI solves a real problem, not just makes a good headline. Data stays on your servers.

## Who we work with
Pittsburgh small and mid-sized businesses. 20–250 employees, $5M–$75M revenue, owner / managing partner / COO signs the check, no procurement committee. Particularly strong fit:

- **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.
- **Healthcare practices and specialty groups**, charts, prior-auth, intake. Patient info has to stay where it should.
- **Accounting / CPA firms**, tax-season document work, client confidentiality blocking off-the-shelf tools.
- **Manufacturers, contractors, insurance agencies**, decades of records nobody can search, retiring seniors taking institutional knowledge with them.

## How to engage (three free ways in)

1. **Five-Minute Self-Assessment**, free, online. Eight questions. Instant snapshot plus written report by email. https://2acrestudios.com/self-assessment/
2. **Six-Minute Phone Assessment**, free. Call (412) 998-1370. Same questions, written report by email in 10 minutes.
3. **Thirty Minutes with Marc**, free. https://calendly.com/marc-shade/one-on-one, book directly, Marc writes the report from the conversation, lands the next morning.

## Pricing
- **The Assessment**, $1,995 fixed fee, 1-week delivery, 5-hours-per-week-back-or-refund guarantee
- **Foundation Monthly Retainer**, $4,500/mo, 20 hours
- **Two-Week Deep Discovery**, $7,500 fixed fee
- **Proof of Concept**, $25K–$60K, 4–6 weeks
- **Production Build**, $75K+, 8–16 weeks, milestone-based

No retainers you didn't ask for. Fixed-fee when scope can be frozen.

## Industry pages (hub: [All industries](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/))
- [Pittsburgh law firm tech partner](https://2acrestudios.com/law/)
- [AI for healthcare](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/healthcare/)
- [AI for financial services & CPA](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/finance/)
- [AI for legal](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/legal/)
- [AI for manufacturing](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/manufacturing/)

## Service pages (hub: [All services](https://2acrestudios.com/services/))
- [Local AI deployment](https://2acrestudios.com/services/local-ai-deployment/)
- [Multi-agent system development](https://2acrestudios.com/services/multi-agent-systems/)
- [RAG pipeline development](https://2acrestudios.com/services/rag-pipelines/)
- [Document intelligence](https://2acrestudios.com/services/document-intelligence/)
- [Customer support AI](https://2acrestudios.com/services/customer-support-ai/)
- [Sales enablement AI](https://2acrestudios.com/services/sales-enablement-ai/)
- [Free AI readiness assessment](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-readiness-assessment/)
- [The Assessment, $1,995 fixed fee, punch-list deliverable](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-audit/) ([sample report](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-audit/sample-report/))

## Local landing pages (Pittsburgh geo + service)
- [Pittsburgh tech help](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-tech-help/), main service-area landing
- [Pittsburgh website design & SEO](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-website-design/), for site rebuilds + SEO
- [Pittsburgh business automation](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-business-automation/), workflow + system integration
- [Pittsburgh AI consulting](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-ai-consulting/), AI-specific local page

## Reference guides (hub: [All guides](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/))
- [Local LLM hardware guide](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/local-llm-hardware/)
- [RAG vs fine-tuning](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/rag-vs-fine-tuning/)
- [Ollama vs vLLM](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/ollama-vs-vllm/)

## Insights / essays (hub: [/insights/](https://2acrestudios.com/insights/))
- [The harness is where value lives](https://2acrestudios.com/insights/the-harness-is-where-value-lives/), the trillion-dollar agentic workflow opportunity isn't in models, it's in the implementation layer around them. Eight components, lifecycle-organized, plus an 8-question buyer-side assessment checklist for any AI vendor. (2026-05-15)
- [The 8 questions buyer-side assessment, LinkedIn carousel](https://2acrestudios.com/insights/the-harness-checklist-carousel/), printable 10-slide PDF carousel version of the 8-question checklist. (2026-05-15)

## Agent-readable artifacts
- [Full site content (markdown)](https://2acrestudios.com/llms-full.txt)
- [Structured data (JSON)](https://2acrestudios.com/agent.json)

## Social
- GitHub: https://github.com/marc-shade (60+ open-source repositories)
- 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

## How we're different
- **The harness.** Every AI system we ship sits inside an eight-part execution harness, organized along the system lifecycle. Before: (1) **workflow design**, which decisions the model makes, which stay human, what "done" means. During: (2) **guard rails**, ninety-seven automated checks before and after every action; (3) **verification gates**, nothing ships as "working" without running end-to-end; (4) **structured memory**, the system remembers your business context across sessions; (5) **decision log**, every decision logged and timestamped; (6) **rollback**, one command undoes anything, with kill switches and three autonomy tiers; (7) **specialized sub-agent review**, twenty-six roles (code reviewer, security checker, debugger, testing) that review each other. After: (8) **ongoing ownership**, who keeps the system tuned, what documentation exists, how recovery looks when something goes sideways. This is what most AI shops skip, and what even OpenAI and Anthropic are now saying matters more than the model itself. Full essay: https://2acrestudios.com/insights/the-harness-is-where-value-lives/
- **Senior people only.** No junior labor. No offshoring. No handoff chain. The people you talk to write the code.
- **Pittsburgh-based, on-site available.** For Western PA clients we come on-site for hardware, stakeholder discovery, and go-live without travel billing.
- **Working tools beat slide decks.** Engagements ship code in days and weeks, not months.
- **Data sovereignty by default.** For regulated industries, we deploy on your own infrastructure, Ollama-based local LLMs, on-premise document intelligence, nothing leaves your firewall.

Last updated: 2026-05-15