About
A studio for the work that has to ship.
Automine is a Canadian AI and automation studio. We turn manual operations into measurable ROI for SMBs, and we turn founder ideas into shipped products. No retainers, no theatre, no ten-person teams to manage one engineer.
The story
Why we started this.
Two things got us here. First: too many Canadian SMBs were paying for “digital transformation” that delivered a roadmap deck and a Notion board, but no working software. Second: too many founders were watching their MVPs get bogged down in agency processes built for enterprise budgets.
We built Automine to be the studio we wished existed when we were on the other side of the table - small enough to keep a senior on every commit, structured enough to commit to a price and a date, and Canadian enough to know what PIPEDA and SR&ED actually mean in practice.
The bar is simple: every engagement should pay for itself. If we can't make that math work in Discover, we tell you early. About a third of audit calls end with us recommending you don't hire us. That's by design.
How we operate
Four rules we don't bend.
Outcomes, not deliverables.
We commit to a measurable result before we commit to a build. If we can't name the ROI, we don't take the engagement.
Senior on every line.
The engineer scoping your work is the one writing it. No juniors hidden behind a project manager. No throw-it-over-the-wall.
Fixed price, fixed scope.
You get a written quote before any build starts. We don't bill against estimates and we don't pad timelines for safety margin.
Code you own.
Your repo, your cloud, your IP. No black-box vendor lock-in, no automation platforms you can't leave. Day one, you could fire us and keep shipping.
Canadian by default
Built for the regulatory reality your business actually lives in.
Canadian SMBs operate under PIPEDA. Quebec businesses operate under Law 25. Both have teeth. We default every infrastructure decision - database region, edge zone, AI provider, storage - to Canadian residency unless you explicitly ask otherwise.
We never use your data to train external models. We flag SR&ED-eligible work during scoping and document it the way the CRA wants to see it. Self-hosted is on the table when the workload demands it.
None of this is a sales pitch. It's how the work has to be done if it's going to last past your next compliance audit.
100%
Senior-led delivery
4–8 wk
Typical Build phase
<90 days
Typical ROI window
CA-first
Data residency by default
The team
Small on purpose.
Automine is a small senior team. Every engineer on the roster has shipped production systems for SMBs, scaled startups, or both. The person on your audit call is the person writing your code.
We don't plan to be a hundred-person agency. We plan to be the studio you call when something has to actually ship - and that means staying small enough to keep the bar where it is.
Want to know who's actually on the call? Easiest way is to book one - we don't do bio pages for the sake of bio pages.
Curious what we'd build for you?
Bring the manual work or the idea. We'll spend 30 minutes mapping it together and send a written plan within one business day.