A studio, deliberately.
Most of your AI workload doesn't need a frontier model, and most of your automation doesn't need a per-task subscription. Crit Studio builds private workflow automation on small models you own — flat cost, your data, accuracy proven on your evals before anything ships.
The 80% thesis. Applied twice.
Most of what companies send to frontier models is routine, narrow work — classification, extraction, drafting, scoring. A small model fine-tuned on that exact task does it cheaper, keeps the data at home, and usually does it better: in distil labs' published work with Knowunity, task accuracy rose from 81% to 93% while inference costs fell 50–68% (vendor-reported). Frontier models are for the hard 20%. We build the split.
The same thesis applies to automation. Per-step subscriptions and per-token APIs both scale against you, so every workflow we build ends on infrastructure you own — the model, the eval set, the runbook. Rented where the task earns it, owned everywhere else.
You talk to the person who ships the system.
Crit Studio is a studio, deliberately: one senior operator who has run this stack in production, plus specialist contractors when a build needs them. No account managers, no handoffs, no team page with stock faces — the person who scopes your system is the person who builds it, deploys it, and answers for it.
We qualify hard. If your workload doesn't clear roughly 50M tokens a month and you have no privacy constraint, a frontier API is probably fine — and we'll tell you so in The Crit.
Our own products run on the same stack we sell you.
We don't recommend an architecture we haven't operated. Four products — built and operated by Crit Studio — run on the same evaluate–fine-tune–deploy–monitor pattern we ship for clients. They are proof of engineering, labelled as our own; we never present them as client work.
We're testing demand across these workflows in the open — the ones with measured pull become the studio's focus. Early clients get disproportionate attention; that's the honest trade.
Four principles we won't trade.
Publish both numbers, always. No cost claim ships without the accuracy delta beside it — measured on your evals, not our slides.
Own the exit. Weights, eval sets, and runbooks are deliverables; any competent team can run the system without us.
Qualify hard. Where a frontier API is the better answer, we say so in writing — the audit exists to kill bad projects early.
Borrow no proof. Our products carry the label "built and operated by Crit Studio"; published benchmarks carry their source. Nothing else appears on this site.
— the rules the studio runs on, in every proposal we send.
Custody is the product.
- Your data stays yours
- No resale, no reuse, no training
- Private cloud by default
- Our own systems run the same way
Talk to the person who builds it.
A short scoping call, then a quote in writing. Two weeks inside your workflows, and you get the numbers — either way.