Unravel
The Dispatch
No. 01 · Summer 2026

How one rebuild killed a runaway cloud bill.

The last quarter in one page. A rebuild that paid for itself, generative video shipped weekly, and a few notes worth stealing.

If you are building an AI product, here is the quarter in one page: how one rebuild cut a cloud bill to near zero, how we ship generative video every week without quality falling apart, and notes you can use whether or not we ever work together.

At a glance

Cloud bill~$0Media egress, down from a projected $45k to $180k a month.
Reliability0Reverts after the rewrite, against 28 in the service before it.
Shipped116Things built and put into production, June to August.

Case study · Client engine rebuild

A rewrite that paid for itself.

0
Reverts after cutover, against 28 before
~50%
Less code, for a larger API surface
~$0
Media egress, from a projected $45k–180k a month

A client's AI music-video engine, written in Java, had grown brittle: frequent reverts, mobile apps breaking in production, and a cloud bill that climbed with every view. We rebuilt it in Python, contract-first and verified against the real clients, so the bugs and the bill fell together.

More from the quarter

Products · try what we build

We ship our own tools, too.

Steno

steno.unravel.tech

Meeting notes that write themselves. Steno captures the conversation and hands you clean, searchable notes when it ends.

Visit Steno →

thing

usething.ai

Push HTML, docs, images, and PDFs from your coding agents to live, commentable, versioned pages your team actually reads. This newsletter runs on it.

Visit thing →

Tablo

tablo.unravel.tech

A tiny floating cat that watches your Claude Code and Codex agents from a corner of your screen. Live context meters, permission approvals, one cat.

Visit Tablo →

Weighing a rebuild or a cost cut?

Thirty minutes. We will tell you straight whether it is worth doing, what it would take, and how we would do it. No pitch deck required.

Book a 30-minute call → Or just reply to this email. It reaches us directly. kapil@unravel.tech