Lone Star Media
Start a project 
Your product team, without the hiring.
Senior engineers who build your product and then keep building it, year after year, without you standing up an engineering department to do it. Start with a two-week piece of work or the whole thing.
Three ways to start.
Most people begin with something small, see how we work, and go from there. That is fine by us. It is how nearly every long client of ours began.
AI wrote your app and now nobody can fix it. We untangle it, make it stable, and get you shipping again. No lectures about how you got here.
Starts with a paid triage. You get a written assessment either way.
Book a triage →You have a product. We connect it to Claude and tools like it, so AI can do real work inside your systems instead of talking about it.
Fixed price, fixed scope, built and handed to your team.
How MCP works →One product, one team, one quarter. We scope it with you in week one, ship every week after that, and you own everything at the end: code, accounts, documentation. If it works, we keep building. If it does not, you still own a real product.
What that quarter looks like →- A scoped product plan in week one
- Working software every Thursday
- Web and mobile where you need it
- An MCP layer, so it is AI-native from day one
- Analytics, so you know what users did
- Everything in your accounts, documented
And then we stay.
Three stages. Most founders start at the first and never leave, because by the end of it we know the product as well as they do.
Prove it
A real, working product in front of real users inside a quarter. Not a prototype, not a deck.
Build it out
The full platform, shipped in weekly increments as you learn what users want. The roadmap is a conversation, not a contract.
Run it
We become your product team. Roadmap, infrastructure, on-call, new features. Senior engineers, without hiring a department.
Slick Cactus was a first build once.
A founder with an idea in commercial real estate and no code. Now brokers run their deals on it: map search, deal tracking, reporting, email automation in one place. Every line of it is ours, and we are still shipping today, years later.
Read the case study →We pay for our own advice.
Ateamo is ours. We built it, we fund it, and we carry the pager for it. Twelve thousand adults in three leagues play on it every week, which is why we argue with founders about the roadmap instead of just building the ticket.
League management for adult recreational sport. Three leagues, twelve thousand players, payments and rosters and scheduling. Everything we recommend to clients, we have already had to live with here.
Visit Ateamo →SessionFYI, our session replay tool, is in quiet beta. Our products →
What it costs
The sprints and the triage are fixed price and quoted before we start, in the low thousands. A full first build is a quarter of a senior team's time and generally starts around $45,000, paid across the quarter. After that, a monthly retainer sized to how much of us you need.
We do not bill hourly and we do not do staff augmentation. If a number here is wrong for you, say so on the first email and we will tell you honestly whether there is a smaller version worth doing.
Being straight with you
We keep a small number of clients on purpose, because running someone's product for years means knowing it as well as they do. Sometimes that means a wait, and we will tell you at the start rather than the end.
We are a poor fit for hourly staffing, for equity in place of fees, and for work that needs to begin next week. We are a good fit if you want opinions and arguments rather than order-taking, and if you want to own everything at the end.
Who you will actually work with.
No account managers, no hand-offs, no junior bench. The engineers you meet on day one are the ones who do the work. Austin, Poland and Ukraine, and we have been building together a long time.
Twenty-five years of clients
“We had undergone a devastating hack and essentially needed to rebuild everything from scratch. Kevin was honest, forthright and reliable… came up with a plan, gave it a timeline, and executed it to perfection… You will understand quickly why we recommend them so highly to all of our colleagues.”
“They jump in with two feet, take ownership, and see it through. Homebuyer.com can do more, faster, with Lone Star Media alongside us.”
“First class in service and performance — every site they've built for us has functioned exceptionally, for over twenty years.”
Fresh thinking.
Notes from the workshop. Something new every week.
A calm, step-by-step triage guide for the worst week of your founder life.
Building in public Why we built our own session replay instead of paying for FullStoryThe build-vs-buy math that turned into SessionFYI.
MCP & AI 5 things your business could do today if it spoke MCPConcrete, unglamorous, money-saving examples from real deployments.