Ask Assistant
| What does Altheia do, in one sentence? | Using AI to help businesses discover, build and own their operating systems, with a clear return on investment. |
| Who is Altheia for? | Local and independent businesses first: gyms, clinics, salons, restaurants, trades, professional services, up through larger operations with document-heavy or repetitive work. If you pay for software, staff hours go to admin, or your website isn’t earning, there’s likely a build here for you. |
| Is the assistant on this site the same product you sell? | Yes. The assistant answering questions on this page is a grounded web employee, the same product Pandora installs on client sites. This site is its live demonstration: it answers only from Altheia’s published information, and when it doesn’t know, it says so. |
| What does anything cost? | A Pandora website is $500 one-time plus a monthly care tier from $50. Adding the grounded web employee to an existing site is $350 one-time plus care from $100 a month, or $700 for a new site with it built in. Custom automation builds run $2,500–$15,000, document intelligence $8,000–$18,000, custom models $4,000–$15,000+. Every price is on its page: nothing is quote-on-request that doesn’t need to be. |
| How do I reach a person? | Submit any form on this site, or ask the assistant to hand you off. A person reviews every submission and responds within two business days. No payment is taken online: fees are confirmed on a call, once scope is set. |
| What is the difference between Altheia and Pandora? | Altheia is the AI venture studio, the parent that builds and runs AI systems and takes on custom builds. Pandora is its web division, the full agency that plans, designs, builds, and hosts websites. In short: Altheia is the studio, and Pandora was built by Altheia. Both run on the same framework, Totsuka. |
| Is Altheia an agency or a studio? | Altheia is a studio. It builds and runs its own products and ventures, like the grounded web employee answering on this site and Pandora, its web division. It also takes on custom builds for businesses. Everything it makes runs on the same framework it uses to run itself. |
| Where is Altheia based? | Altheia AI Venture Studios Inc. is based in Montreal, Quebec, and works in both French and English. |
| What is Solis? | Solis is a capability demonstration Altheia is building on Solana, showing its method works past the web in a complex technical domain. It is not a product for sale and not a financial service. |
| What does the $500 build actually include? | A complete website built from scratch for your business: planned, designed, written, bilingual (English and French, written for real), optimized to load fast and be found by search engines and AI search. No generic template. You own it. |
| If I own the site, why is there a monthly fee? | The build fee buys the site; the monthly tier keeps it alive and working: hosting, security, backups, monitoring, and depending on tier, monthly search reports and content edits. You own the site regardless of tier. Prepay the year and the monthly rate drops. |
| How long until my site is live? | Full build time is 2–3 weeks. Completing the onboarding pack and one discovery call with your Lead Build Operator, the human in charge of your build, is normally enough to deliver a prototype for your verification before launch. |
| I already have a website. Is any of this for me? | Two paths: run your address through the free Site Score Audit to see exactly where your current site stands, or add the grounded web employee to the site you already have. It deploys without rebuilding anything. |
| Who actually builds the site, AI or people? | Both, deliberately: specialized AI agents run design, engineering, copy, and SEO, coordinated and checked by a human Lead Operator under Altheia’s operating method, Totsuka. That structure is why the build takes weeks instead of months and why nothing ships on an AI’s say-so. |
| What happens when it doesn’t know the answer? | It says so, plainly, and hands the visitor to you. It does not guess. Answering only from your business’s knowledge is the entire design, and “I don’t know, a person will take it from here” is it working, not failing. |
| Where do its answers come from? | Only from the knowledge you give it: your services, processes, prices, and facts, gathered during setup and kept current under your Care plan. It doesn’t answer from the open internet, and nothing behind the scenes is exposed to visitors. |
| Can it book appointments, quote prices, or take payments? | No, by design. It won’t quote, book, take a payment, or make a call that should be yours. It informs, routes, captures the visitor’s need and contact details, and hands you a structured lead summary: the decisions stay with you. |
| What do the Care plans cover? | Standard ($100/mo) keeps it answering and capturing 24/7 with grounding upkeep twice a year; Plus ($150/mo) refreshes grounding four times a year. Both include scheduled system and model updates, and both drop with annual prepay ($90/$140). Altheia hosts and manages everything: you hold no keys and maintain nothing. |
| What does it cost to get started? | On a site you already have: a one-time $350 deploy fee plus your Care plan. No site yet? Pandora builds one with the web employee included for $700 one-time. Either way, a person confirms scope on a call before any fee. No payment online. |
| How is a grounded web employee different from a chatbot? | A typical chatbot guesses from generic internet training and can make things up. A grounded web employee answers only from the knowledge you give it. When it does not know something, it says so and points to a person instead of inventing an answer. That is the “grounded” part. |
| Will the web employee make things up? | It is built not to. It answers only from the business knowledge you give it, and when a question falls outside that, it says it does not know rather than guessing. It runs under Altheia’s operating framework, Totsuka, whose core rule is that nothing counts unless it can be proven. |
| Does the web employee work in French and English? | Yes, in both, at the same standard. French is not a lighter version of the English. |
| Can I add a grounded web employee to my existing website? | Yes. It deploys onto your current site without rebuilding it. Altheia sets it up, grounds it in your business knowledge, and runs it for you as a managed service, so you hold no keys and maintain nothing. |
| What information does the grounded web employee collect? | It captures what a visitor chooses to share in the conversation: what they are looking for, their context, and their contact details if they provide them. That comes to you as a lead summary you can act on. It answers only from the knowledge you give it and does not expose anything behind the scenes. |
| Why publish your operating method at all? | Because “trust us, it’s AI” is exactly the pitch this industry overuses. Publishing the method lets you check the work: nothing counts as done here until it’s been seen working live and a person has cleared it. If we can’t show it, we don’t claim it. |
| What does “proof over assertion” mean for my project? | Every output on your build passes a human gate and gets verified in a live environment before it moves forward. An AI’s claim of completion is never sufficient, including on this site, which was built under the same rule. |
| So does AI do the work, or do humans? | Specialized agents do the production work: each trained for one role, never one general-purpose model doing everything. Humans set the objective, gate every output, and verify the result. On your build, that human is your Lead Operator. |
| What stops the AI from making things up on my project? | Two structures. The governing loop catches drift while we build: direct, build, gate, verify, route, govern. The three-layer brain bounds what we deploy: a fixed identity, your curated knowledge strictly isolated, and guardrails that keep sensitive information out of reach. |
| Is Totsuka something I get, or just something you use? | Both. Every build runs through the loop, and every deployed agent, including a web employee on your site, carries the three-layer structure. The method isn’t a marketing page; it’s the reason the products behave. |
| How do I know if a custom build is worth it for my business? | Run your numbers through the estimator on this page: software spend, admin hours, card volume. The test is published: a build only goes ahead if it pays for itself within 12–18 months and your monthly operating cost is lower after it ships than before. If your numbers don’t clear, we say so. |
| Why do some builds require a $2,000 discovery and others don’t? | Automation tools and business apps scope on a free call: you walk us through your week, we hand you a fixed written quote. Document intelligence and custom model builds are investments of a different size, and scoping them properly is days of real work: statements, workflows, documents, architecture. That discovery is $2,000, standalone paid work. It is not credited toward the build, because the finding's independence is the point, and the written finding is yours to keep whether or not you build. We only offer it when the plausible finding is worth several times the fee. |
| What happens if the math doesn’t clear? | You get that verdict in writing, with the cheaper fix named: an off-the-shelf tool, a smaller build, or the web employee. The written finding is yours to keep either way. We’d rather lose a build than sell one that fails our own test. |
| What do you need from me to get started? | Three ballpark numbers: what you pay monthly for operations software, hours a week on admin, what you take on cards, and a couple of sentences about what should exist that doesn’t. Two minutes. Documents only come into it later, at scoping, and your numbers stay yours, stored in Canada. |
| Do I own what you build? | Yes: you own and host the tool. That’s the point: the return is counted in subscriptions you stop renting, hours your payroll stops burning, and fees above what your volume warrants. Software that runs your operations shouldn’t be a landlord. |
| Why can’t I just use ChatGPT or a prompt to build my tool? | A prompt can produce a prototype that looks finished, but it usually breaks the moment you try to change it or scale it. Building something that holds means architecting what is underneath: where the data lives, how it connects, how it is delivered. That engineering is the part a prompt skips, and it is the part Altheia does. |
| How is this different from vibe coding? | Vibe coding gets you a prototype from a prompt, then stalls, because prompting alone cannot answer how the data is stored, how the pieces connect, or how it scales. Altheia architects and engineers the build all the way through, so what ships actually works and can be sold or used for real. |
| What does the audit actually measure? | How fast your site loads, how findable it is, whether search engines and AI search can actually read it, and what specifically is holding it back. A concrete picture of where you stand before spending a dollar. |
| What do you do with my web address? | Run the audit, that’s it. Submitting it is consent to collect it for that purpose. This site uses no analytics or advertising tracking, and we don’t sell information. |
| What happens after I see my score? | Nothing, unless you want it to. The score is yours. If you want what it found fixed, that’s a conversation with Pandora, but a bad score creates no obligation and triggers no sales calls you didn’t ask for. |
| My score is bad. Does that mean I need a whole new site? | Not necessarily. Sometimes the honest answer is targeted fixes to what you have; sometimes the structure underneath can’t be saved and a rebuild is cheaper than repair. The audit shows which situation you’re in, and we’ll tell you plainly, either way. |
| Why is this free? | Because it’s the fastest honest way to start: you see exactly where you stand, we prove we can find real problems, and neither of us wastes a call finding out there’s nothing to fix. |
| Who is behind Altheia? | Christopher Hull, founder, in Montreal. The studio runs as one human directing specialized AI agents across design, engineering, copy, compliance, and operations. Every output gated and verified by a person under the published operating method. |
| Isn’t this site AI-built too? What makes that different from the “vibe-coding” you warn about? | Yes, and that’s the demonstration. The difference isn’t whether AI writes the code; it’s whether anything is architected and verified underneath: where the data lives, how the pieces connect, who gates the output. Vibe-coding skips exactly that, and it’s why prompted prototypes collapse when reality touches them. |
| What does “own your data” actually mean here? | It starts with questions most businesses can’t answer: where does your data live, do you own it, which systems connect, how does your team actually use it, what feeds it. Builds here put the answers, and the ownership, with you, not with a stack of rented subscriptions. |
| Why should a small business trust a studio this new? | Don’t trust: check. The test every build must pass is published, the operating method is published, the prices are published, and the products run live on this site. If the numbers don’t clear for your business, you’ll hear that from us first, in writing. |
| What’s the first step? | Whichever is least effort for you: ask the assistant anything, run the free site audit, or drop your numbers in the Business & Enterprise estimator. A person reviews everything personally and responds within two business days. |