# 2 Acre Studios

> Pittsburgh tech shop since 2010. Websites, SEO, automation, customer-service tools, and AI when it actually fits. Senior people only, no junior labor. Serving small and mid-sized Pittsburgh businesses, law firms, healthcare practices, CPA firms, manufacturers, contractors, and insurance agencies.

## Quick facts
- **Name:** 2 Acre Studios
- **Founded:** 2010
- **Based in:** Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
- **Service area:** Pittsburgh + Western Pennsylvania + remote across North America
- **Team:** Marc Shade (Founder, shipping software since 1997), Scott Frederick Laughlin (Co-founder, cloud architect / AI ML engineer)
- **Phone (intake / assessment line):** (412) 998-1370
- **Phone (founder direct):** (412) 407-6170
- **Email:** marc@2acrestudios.com
- **Website:** https://2acrestudios.com

## What we do
We fix what's actually slowing your business down. Four categories of work:

1. **Websites that work and show up on Google.** Rebuild stale sites in 2–4 weeks, set up SEO that actually ranks, hand off something the team can update themselves.
2. **Phones and customer service that handle themselves.** Systems that answer the easy questions, escalate the real ones, and email a clean daily log.
3. **Automation for the busywork.** Connect the two systems your bookkeeper is copying numbers between every Friday. Typically pays for itself in a month.
4. **AI when it earns its place.** Smart search across years of files, first-draft contracts, after-hours customer answers, when AI solves a real problem, not just makes a good headline. Data stays on your servers.

## Who we work with
Pittsburgh small and mid-sized businesses. 20–250 employees, $5M–$75M revenue, owner / managing partner / COO signs the check, no procurement committee. Particularly strong fit:

- **Law firms**, 10 to 150 attorneys. Associates buried in document review, partners want the firm to stop being the slow one, client material can't go anywhere off the firm's servers.
- **Healthcare practices and specialty groups**, charts, prior-auth, intake. Patient info has to stay where it should.
- **Accounting / CPA firms**, tax-season document work, client confidentiality blocking off-the-shelf tools.
- **Manufacturers, contractors, insurance agencies**, decades of records nobody can search, retiring seniors taking institutional knowledge with them.

## How to engage (three free ways in)

1. **Five-Minute Self-Assessment**, free, online. Eight questions. Instant snapshot plus written report by email. https://2acrestudios.com/self-assessment/
2. **Six-Minute Phone Assessment**, free. Call (412) 998-1370. Same questions, written report by email in 10 minutes.
3. **Thirty Minutes with Marc**, free. https://calendly.com/marc-shade/one-on-one, book directly, Marc writes the report from the conversation, lands the next morning.

## Pricing
- **Foundation Monthly Retainer**, $4,500/mo, 20 hours
- **Two-Week Deep Discovery**, $7,500 fixed fee
- **Proof of Concept**, $25K–$60K, 4–6 weeks
- **Production Build**, $75K+, 8–16 weeks, milestone-based

No retainers you didn't ask for. Fixed-fee when scope can be frozen.

## Industry pages (hub: [All industries](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/))
- [Pittsburgh law firm tech partner](https://2acrestudios.com/law/)
- [AI for healthcare](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/healthcare/)
- [AI for financial services & CPA](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/finance/)
- [AI for legal](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/legal/)
- [AI for manufacturing](https://2acrestudios.com/industries/manufacturing/)

## Service pages (hub: [All services](https://2acrestudios.com/services/))
- [Local AI deployment](https://2acrestudios.com/services/local-ai-deployment/)
- [Multi-agent system development](https://2acrestudios.com/services/multi-agent-systems/)
- [RAG pipeline development](https://2acrestudios.com/services/rag-pipelines/)
- [Document intelligence](https://2acrestudios.com/services/document-intelligence/)
- [Customer support AI](https://2acrestudios.com/services/customer-support-ai/)
- [Sales enablement AI](https://2acrestudios.com/services/sales-enablement-ai/)
- [Free AI readiness assessment](https://2acrestudios.com/services/ai-readiness-assessment/)

## Local landing pages (Pittsburgh geo + service)
- [Pittsburgh tech help](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-tech-help/), main service-area landing
- [Pittsburgh website design & SEO](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-website-design/), for site rebuilds + SEO
- [Pittsburgh business automation](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-business-automation/), workflow + system integration
- [Pittsburgh AI consulting](https://2acrestudios.com/pittsburgh-ai-consulting/), AI-specific local page

## Reference guides (hub: [All guides](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/))
- [Local LLM hardware guide](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/local-llm-hardware/)
- [RAG vs fine-tuning](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/rag-vs-fine-tuning/)
- [Ollama vs vLLM](https://2acrestudios.com/guides/ollama-vs-vllm/)

## Agent-readable artifacts
- [Full site content (markdown)](https://2acrestudios.com/llms-full.txt)
- [Structured data (JSON)](https://2acrestudios.com/agent.json)

## Social
- GitHub: https://github.com/marc-shade (60+ open-source repositories)
- GitHub Org: https://github.com/2acrestudios
- LinkedIn (company): https://linkedin.com/company/2-acre-studios
- LinkedIn (Marc): https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcshade
- LinkedIn (Scott): https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-engineer-inventor
- Discord: https://discord.gg/9DvzfsrYFA

## How we're different
- **Senior people only.** No junior labor. No offshoring. No handoff chain. The people you talk to write the code.
- **Pittsburgh-based, on-site available.** For Western PA clients we come on-site for hardware, stakeholder discovery, and go-live without travel billing.
- **Working tools beat slide decks.** Engagements ship code in days and weeks, not months.
- **Data sovereignty by default.** For regulated industries, we deploy on your own infrastructure, Ollama-based local LLMs, on-premise document intelligence, nothing leaves your firewall.

Last updated: 2026-05-12