The evaluation is useful only if it changes a real decision. Record the blocked operation, platform owner, technical owner, budget owner, current alternative, production consequence and decision date before starting. Interest in AI alone is insufficient.
Technical gate
The customer engineer can install the agreed composition, establish exact authority, run the supported rollback, observe failure, preserve UNKNOWN, reconcile using native evidence and export the lifecycle. Cases A–J have explicit pass/fail/blocked evidence and limitations. No bypass is found within the agreed review scope. Founder interventions and unresolved security issues are counted.
A correctly retained UNKNOWN may satisfy a failure-semantics test. It does not by itself establish acceptable day-to-day operations. Define who investigates unresolved effects, available history, acceptable investigation time and escalation before acceptance.
Economic and operating gate
Compare the same contract with the actual native alternative. Measure customer installation/configuration, custom engineering, support and incident/recovery effort separately. Agree a useful improvement threshold with the owner instead of imposing an invented percentage. Include ongoing Node/database upgrades, credential rotation, backups, monitoring and retention.
Recurring software value requires substantially reusable contracts. If each customer needs different engineering and continual founder operation, record the result as services-heavy rather than calling it self-service software.
Four closeout outcomes
| Decision | Evidence required |
|---|---|
| Continue to annual/production scoping | Technical acceptance, useful native-stack advantage, named budget owner and separately planned production admission. |
| Extend a bounded evaluation | Specific unresolved question, owner, time/cost cap and written scope decision. |
| Native stack sufficient | It meets the agreed contract at acceptable operating cost. Preserve that finding. |
| Stop | No urgent workflow, no repeatable advantage, unacceptable trust/availability burden or no willingness to pay. |
The acceptance installment uses the previously agreed contract milestone. Purchase, payment, technical acceptance and permission to change production are separate records. A technical pass with no willingness to pay remains an unproven commercial thesis.
Close access and retain the truth
Export the agreed redacted result and lifecycle evidence. Revoke evaluation grants and remove temporary identities/credentials through customer procedures. Stop/delete only explicitly agreed evaluation resources after retaining required evidence; do not silently destroy unresolved obligations. Record remaining UNKNOWN operations and transfer ownership before shutdown.
Document next operation requests as evidence, not automatic roadmap promises. Broader implementation should normally follow repeated demand from independent companies with the same missing requirement and a budget owner, unless a paying customer explicitly funds a bounded bespoke scope.
The closeout records the completion date, customer decision, reasons, assistance hours and data/access disposition. That date anchors any agreed 90-day annual-credit period. Neither public reference rights nor customer endorsement is included by default.