Professional help

The open community is the right place for most questions: public design discussion, help getting unstuck, and a second pair of eyes on a model. It is free, it is fast, and it stays open to everyone.

Sometimes a team needs something the community cannot give it — private domain context, a scheduled workshop, a written architecture review, or hands-on help moving a real slice into Cratis. That is what dedicated help is for. This page explains how it differs from community support and when it is worth the cost; Work with us covers what we actually help with and how to get in touch.

Work with us What we help teams with, how we work, and how to start a conversation.

Ask in the community first Use Discord when the question can be discussed in the open, or when you are still exploring the problem.

Choose an adoption path Work through the adoption guide before a paid engagement, so the starting point is already clear.

Community help compared with dedicated help

	Community	Dedicated
Cost	Free	Paid, scoped per engagement
Response	Best-effort, when someone is available	Agreed up front
Context	Public — share only what you can share openly	Private, including code and domain detail
Shape	Questions and answers, design discussion	Workshops, reviews, pairing, focused development, training
Output	A thread, and often a documentation improvement	A deliverable: a model, a plan, a written review, or working code
Depth	One problem at a time	Your whole system, in context

When dedicated help is worth it

Reach for a paid engagement when the thing blocking you is not a missing answer:

• The context cannot be public. The domain, the schema, or the roadmap is confidential.
• You need someone’s calendar, not their goodwill. A workshop on a date, or a review by a deadline, is a commitment the community cannot make.
• The decision is expensive to reverse. Consistency boundaries, tenancy, and storage choices are cheap to change now and costly later.
• You need the whole team moved at once. Training a team is a session, not a thread.
• You want a durable artifact. A written review or a modeled backlog outlives a Discord conversation.

If none of those apply, the community will probably serve you better — and faster.

Where to go instead

If you need…	Go to…
What we help with, and how to make contact	Work with us
An open question, design discussion, or setup help	Community and help
A grounded, cited answer from the documentation	Prompter on Discord
To report a suspected vulnerability	Security
To suggest an improvement or report confusing documentation	Feedback and suggestions
A reproducible bug or a feature request	The matching GitHub issue tracker
A route through the documentation for your role	Learning paths

Commercial work is separate from community help

Discord remains open and best-effort, and asking there never depends on being a customer. Professional engagements are private, time-boxed, and handled separately from the open-source support channels. Any engagement also depends on availability and on the relevant consultancy, employer, and conflict-of-interest arrangements.