Canopus engineering insights are practical guides on the questions technical buyers ask before committing budget: what a build genuinely costs, which architecture decisions are expensive to reverse, and how projects fail in ways that are predictable. Each one names the trade-offs behind the answer rather than dealing in generalities.
Four decisions set the number before anyone writes code — how many roles the product has, whether billing is flat or metered, what it has to integrate with, and whether an enterprise buyer arrives in year one.
PricingMVPMulti-tenancy Read
Every model transfers risk somewhere, and a premium is charged for carrying it. The honest comparison, plus the three cases where we tell a client the model they asked for is the wrong one.
ContractsRiskScoping Read
Five questions, run per process rather than per company — which is why most answers come back mixed. Includes the products we tell clients to buy instead, and the customisation trap that follows.
ArchitectureProcurement Read
Fine-tuning changes behaviour, retrieval changes knowledge. Most teams reach for the wrong one, and because the output still reads plausibly, the mistake is slow and expensive to discover.
RAGLLMEvaluation Read
One question settles most of it: does the app need to keep doing something with the screen off? Here is the specific list of cases where cross-platform does not serve, and why we quote the dearer option for them.
FlutterReact NativeSwift Read
Six findings recur on almost every cost review — instances sized from an old guess, staging billed around the clock to be used part-time, orphaned volumes, cross-zone chatter. All configuration, none of it architecture.
AWSFinOpsObservability Read
A stopped sync produces no errors — it produces nothing, and monitoring built to catch errors shows a clean dashboard while the data quietly diverges. Five failure modes, each with the fix that prevents it.
APIsWebhooksReconciliation Read
Seven are published so far. If you need an answer that is not here, send us the question — it usually becomes the next one.
That is all seven — we publish when a question earns it