Hi, I'm Kartikeya
I'm an independent full-stack and AI product engineer based in Lucknow, India. I work alone on purpose: one person who understands the product, the code and the bill end to end makes better trade-offs than a relay of specialists.
Most of my time goes into two things. The first is client work: founders and small teams come to me with an idea or a half-built app, and I take it through scoping, design, a Flutter or web build, and release. The second is my own studio, where I build products for people in India and abroad, a few of which are open for early access.
I care a lot about the unglamorous parts: whether an AI feature makes or loses money per user, whether a consent screen would satisfy the DPDP Act, whether the app still feels fast on a ₹10,000 Android phone on a patchy network. The writing on this site is where I share what I learn, with real numbers.
How I work
- Every element earns its place
- If a screen, a field or a feature can't say why it exists, it goes. Smaller apps are faster to build, cheaper to run and easier to love.
- Costs are a design input
- Hosting, AI tokens and store fees are decided at the whiteboard, not discovered on the invoice. Each feature gets a per-user cost before it gets code.
- Privacy by default
- Collect less, keep it shorter, and make deletion one tap. It's what India's DPDP Act and the GDPR require, and it's what users expect anyway.
- Ship, measure, then polish
- Get a working version into real hands quickly, watch what people actually do, and spend design effort where it changes behaviour.
Tools I use daily
| Mobile | Flutter, Dart, native platform channels, Play Store and App Store release |
|---|---|
| Web | Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, PWAs |
| Backend | Node.js, Firebase (Firestore, Auth, Functions), PostgreSQL, Redis |
| AI | LLM APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, evals, caching and cost controls |
| Ops | Vercel, Google Cloud, CI/CD, monitoring, Core Web Vitals |
Hire me for a project
MVPs, AI features, rescues.
Try what I'm building
Free, invite-only early access.
Read my code
Open-source work on GitHub.