DarkForge
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info@darkforgeai.com Orange County, California Monday to Friday, 9 to 6 Pacific
The DarkForge studio floor: an anvil holding a glowing bar of steel, with the engineering desks and the DarkForge sign behind it.

An AI engineering studio building the systems modern businesses run on.

We partner with operators in wellness, e-commerce, real estate and professional services to design, build and run custom AI agents, commerce platforms and the infrastructure underneath them. Every engagement is scoped, priced and dated in writing before work starts.

Start a project See the work
Est. 2024, Anaheim, California Fixed-scope engagements Southern California in person, United States remote
50+
Projects shipped
Wellness, commerce, real estate, healthcare
99.97%
Agent uptime
Production AI support agents
3.4×
Inbound leads
Lead-gen rebuild for a SoCal brokerage
68%
Tickets auto-resolved
D2C support agent with human handoff

The stack we ship on.

Deliberately boring and deliberately portable. Your next engineer will already know it, and everything we build lives in your own accounts.

Next.js
React
TypeScript
Node.js
Python
Shopify
Stripe
Supabase
PostgreSQL
Netlify
Cloudflare
Anthropic

Featured projects

Production systems with the numbers attached. Every metric here comes from a live deployment.

KeyKarams homepage: a machined gold key spinner over a black background with the headline Upgrade Your KeysShopify · D2C

KeyKarams

2025

A storefront for a precision-machined key spinner. Brand-first product pages, mobile checkout and Klaviyo recovery flows, all wired in from launch.

98PageSpeed
+22%Cart recovery
10+SKUs
The Network Agency homepage: an aerial photo of the Orange County coastline with a home search barReal estate · Lead generation

The Network Agency

2025

A lead-generation platform for an Orange County brokerage: listings search, agent profiles and a contact pipeline that reaches the inbox instead of the spam folder.

100Lighthouse
3.4×Inbound leads
100%Spam blocked
A monitor on a steel desk in the studio showing a dark chat interfaceAI systems · Customer operations

AI Support Agent

2026

A Claude-powered support agent for D2C brands. It looks up orders, handles refunds and exchanges through Stripe and Shopify, and hands off to a person when it is not sure.

68%Auto-resolved
1.4 sAvg response
99.97%Uptime
HairRx Lab homepage: a large headline reading Hair regrowth that actually worksTelehealth · Prescription commerce

FoliRx · HairRx Lab

2026

An editorial storefront for a compounded prescription, built with the disclosures and compliance review that a regulated product needs from day one.

6Pages
30+Motion blocks
RxCompliance reviewed
All work

Capabilities

We take on the whole system: strategy, design, engineering and the infrastructure that keeps it running, under one accountable team. Most engagements draw on two or three of these at once.

Molten metal flowing through channels engraved like circuit traces in a black steel plate

AI Systems & Automation

Custom agents and automations built on your data and wired into Stripe, Shopify, HubSpot, email and internal databases. Evaluation before launch, monitoring after, and a clean handoff to a person when confidence drops.

ClaudeOpenAIOpen modelspgvectorNodePython
AI systems
A precision-machined black metal panel with a thin line of warm light along its edge

Product & Web Engineering

Marketing sites, web applications, intake flows and telehealth experiences, designed and engineered by the same team. Fast, accessible and instrumented from the first deploy.

Next.jsAstroTypeScriptSupabasePostgres
Product & web
Three matte black product boxes stacked on a steel shelf under warm side light

Commerce Platforms

Shopify and headless storefronts with the operating layer included: catalog architecture, Klaviyo and Stripe flows, inventory sync, compliance pages and the pipelines that keep product content moving.

ShopifyHeadlessKlaviyoStripeCompliance-aware
Commerce
A thin orange laser line sweeping across a dark brushed-steel surface with fine measurement marks

Growth Engineering

Technical SEO, structured data, local search for Southern California businesses, conversion audits with a written action plan, and analytics that show which channel is paying.

Technical SEOSchemaLocal SEOCROAnalytics
Growth
The locking mechanism of a heavy black steel vault door, lit by a warm glow

Infrastructure & Security

Domains, DNS, SSL, email deliverability, security headers, backups and monitoring, for one property or a portfolio of them. Migrations planned to the record and executed without downtime.

CloudflareNetlifyDNSSPF · DKIM · DMARCMonitoring
Infrastructure
Services and engagement models Fixed-price proposal within 48 hours of scoping

How a build runs

Four phases with named deliverables. You always know where the work is, what ships next and what is blocking.

A raw steel billet on a scorched workbench beside an engineering notebook and calipers
01

Discovery

A working session on the job to be done. We define scope, what is out of scope, and the metric that decides success. Fixed-price proposal within 48 hours.

Days 1 to 3
A bar of glowing steel being drawn out of a forge with tongs
02

Prototype

Something real to break inside a week: the agent answering, the site rendering, the automation firing end to end. Small, rough and yours to test.

Days 4 to 10
A hammer striking a glowing bar of steel on an anvil, sparks flying
03

Delivery

Production hardening: logging, error handling, rate limits, monitoring, tests and documentation. Deployed to your repo and your accounts.

Days 11 to 18
A finished black steel multi-tool resting on a folded linen cloth with a brass tag
04

Transfer

A recorded walkthrough, written runbooks and a support window where fixes are on us. After that you can run it without us.

Days 18 to 21 and after
The full process

Put a number on the manual work.

Estimate what a recurring task costs your team each year and how much of it an agent can absorb. Bring the result to the scoping call. It is how we decide what to build first.

Hours per week spent on the task20 hrs
Loaded hourly cost of the people doing it$45/hr
Share of the work an agent can handle70%
Annual cost of doing it by hand$46,800
Recoverable in year one$32,760
Hours returned to the team per year728 hrs

Estimates only. Most automation engagements we scope pay back inside the first quarter of operation. The proposal shows the actual math for your case.

Scope this with us

Questions clients ask before they start

If yours is not here, email us. We answer the same business day.

How long does an engagement take?
Most fixed-scope builds ship in two to six weeks from kickoff, depending on the system. A focused agent or automation can be live in under ten days. A multi-agent platform or a headless storefront runs longer. The proposal commits to a date.
How do you price work?
Every engagement is a fixed price for a fixed scope, quoted in writing within 48 hours of the scoping session. Ongoing work runs on a month-to-month growth retainer or an embedded team arrangement. See engagement models. We do not bill hourly.
Who owns the code, accounts and data?
You do, from day one. Code lives in your repository, infrastructure and API keys in your accounts, data in your database. We hand over runbooks at transfer and never charge exit fees.
What do you build on?
Web: Next.js, Astro and Shopify. Backend: Node, Python, Postgres and Supabase. Payments and email: Stripe, Klaviyo and Resend. AI: Claude, OpenAI and open models with retrieval on pgvector or Pinecone. Infrastructure: Netlify and Cloudflare.
Do you work with regulated products?
Yes. Telehealth, compounded and wellness products, and other verticals with disclosure and data-handling requirements. We build the compliance pages and controls into the plan and have counsel review before launch. We do not give legal advice ourselves.
Where are you, and do you work remotely?
Anaheim, in Orange County, California. We meet Southern California clients in person when it helps and work with the rest of the United States remotely, in Pacific time, with a shared Slack channel for every engagement.
We do not know exactly what we need yet. Is that a problem?
No. That is what the discovery session is for. We map the workflow, tell you what is worth automating first, and say so plainly if we are the wrong fit.

Start a project

Tell us what needs to work.

Describe the workflow, the storefront or the system. We reply within one business day with next steps and a scoping slot.

Send a brief How an engagement runs