Building Attestal in the open

Attestal sells one thing: verification you can check, not a claim you have to trust.A company like that has no business hiding how it builds. So this is the build log, and it starts with the front door — the site you're reading — because the front door is the first thing that can lie, and the easiest place to prove we won't.

The brief, honestly scoped

This is the marketing site, v1 — not the platform. No auth, no console, no database. The product's own plan is deliberately un-flashy: one cloud (AWS), one pipeline stage (SFT), two or three design partners onboarded by hand. A self-serve console would be theater at this stage. So the site's job isn't to demo a product that isn't self-serve yet — it's to get the right people talking to us, and to be visibly honest while doing it.

That made the stack easy: static-first (Astro), no backend, one build command, deploys to a CDN. The only dynamic thing on the whole site is the live training feed — and even that degrades to a truthful "launching" state rather than inventing runs it can't show yet.

The palette means something

The design is dark and restrained on purpose — a serious enterprise console, not an ops-tool skin with a starfield. But the three accent colors aren't decoration. Amber is a run in progress, teal is verified/passed, coral is failed. They're the exact semantics from the reference pipeline's own live dashboard. Color that carries state is honest; color that carries mood is noise. We kept the first and cut the second.

Two tiers, one honest axis

Here's the model, and it's the part I'm proudest of because it's fair:

Train in the open for free. Train in a private enclave for money. You pay for privacy — not for the rigor. The rigor is standard.

The free tier is real fine-tuning on real GPUs — three slots on three H200s — with the same signed audit record the paid tier gets. The catch is stated at the door, not buried: your dataset and the resulting weights are saved, and may be published to the open corpus. Free means public. That's the price, and it's an honest one.

What makes the split clean instead of cannibalizing: a regulated enterprise cannot use the free tier — their data isn't allowed to be public, by law. So the two tiers are separated by the customer's own compliance boundary, not by a feature gate we'd have to defend. Nobody who needs the paid tier can use the free one, and nobody happy with the free one needed to pay. Zero overlap.

The live feed is honesty as a feature

Because free runs are public, the site can show exactly what's training right now, and when the next of the three slots frees up. That transparency isn't a gimmick — it's the product's whole thesis rendered as a widget. It reuses a pattern we already built elsewhere (a telemetry beacon that polls an endpoint and renders real state), including the important part: when there's nothing real to show, it says so. No fake queue, no invented loss curve. An empty feed that admits it's empty is worth more than a full one that's lying.

What isn't built yet — said plainly

This is a front door. Behind it, the platform is still the reference pipeline being productized: the credential broker that makes BYOC real, the cryptographic signing on the audit record, the free-tier training gateway that will feed that live slot. The site names the tiers and shows the concept; it doesn't pretend the enclave is a button you can click today. When those land, they land here, in this log, with the same accounting.

That's the whole ethos: the report and the reality are the same object. If you're the kind of team that finds that reassuring rather than slow — we should talk.