SUNSET '26 · built under the agency · an honest obituary
A GenAI creative-execution platform for agencies, built under my own agency and piloted with its paying clients. I was product lead: model selection per job, prompt and human-in-the-loop design, credits priced against unit cost, plus the design and the build directed through AI coding tools.
Agencies burn their hours on variants, not concepts. A client's 40 festive variants came from one master and forty designer-hours, and nothing on the market cut that for an agency's real briefs.
Product lead on a working creative-execution layer, not a wrapper: template editor, AI Studio and a credit-metered business layer, piloted on real briefs for the agency's paying clients.
Someone hacked an API key and ran generation around the clock, and the cloud bill hit ₹8 lakh we couldn't pay. My co-founder was down with dengue the same month, and Higgsfield took the category. We shut it down.
01 What we built
Not a wrapper. A working creative-execution layer for agencies, with Gemini, Imagen and Veo under the hood and Firebase and Vertex holding it up. We piloted it with the agency's own paying clients: real briefs, real deliverables.
Drop in an existing creative and the model detects which regions are text, logo, product, background, so a client's 40 festive variants come from one master, not forty designers-hours.
No manual masking. Editable zones inferred from the design itself.
The agency's actual bottleneck: variants, not concepts.
Konva and PixiJS canvas where generated images, video and copy live side by side and get composed into finished creatives, with brand kits auto-generated by crawling the client's website.
Colours, fonts and tone pulled from the client's own site via Firecrawl.
Text, image and video generation behind one surface.
A workflow catalog for repeatable jobs, credit-based billing metered per generation, and an admin CMS to run it all. The unglamorous half that turns a demo into a product.
Every generation metered, which is exactly what the hacked key exploited.
Templates, users, credits and workflows managed without touching code.
02 Cause of death
Three hits in one season. Someone hacked an API key and ran generation around the clock; the cloud bill hit ₹8 lakh we couldn't pay. The same month my co-founder went down with dengue. And Higgsfield took the category with capital we didn't have.
three hits in one season
no refunds on lessons. they're keepers.
Most portfolios hide this one. I think it's the most useful thing in mine.
03 What it taught me
Watch the infra bill like it's your own money, because it was. Lock down every key. Meter every quota. Treat cloud spend as a product feature.
When I built ELTH next, I hunted down 1.9 million wasteful database reads a day before they could hurt anyone. Same scar, better reflexes.
And: shipping fast is survivable. Shipping fast without an ops guardrail is not. That's precisely the muscle you're renting when you hire me.
