Everything your vendor review needs.
This page answers the questions procurement, IT leadership and data protection officers put to an AI vendor — before you have to ask them. Anything missing, I deliver on request within 24 hours: info@tippel.ai.
A work contract with acceptance criteria — no open-ended estimates
| Contract type | Fixed-price work contract (German “Werkvertrag”). Scope, dates and measurable acceptance criteria are written into the offer. The optional post-launch maintenance package (retainer) is a separate service contract, cancellable monthly. |
| Payment plan | 30% at project start · 40% across agreed milestones · 30% after acceptance. For the Readiness Check: invoice on delivery of the report. |
| Acceptance | Against the criteria defined in the offer — for example, hit rates on a test dataset agreed in advance. You know what “done” is measured by before signing. |
| Changes | New requirements during the project receive a written supplementary offer before they are built. The running fixed price is untouched. |
| Rights & source code | Source code, documentation and usage rights transfer fully to you. No licence model, no lock-in — the system is yours. |
| Warranty | Statutory warranty under German work-contract law; fixing defects against the acceptance criteria is naturally part of it. |
| Confidentiality | NDA on request before the first substantive conversation — your template or mine. |
Data flows your DPO can sign off
For every deployment path you receive a data processing agreement (Art. 28 GDPR) and documented data flows. Your data is never used for training — on any path.
Cloud API
Your documents stay in your systems. Only the individual request travels, encrypted, to OpenAI, Anthropic or Microsoft Azure — via EU endpoints, under the provider’s DPA with zero-data-retention options. Subprocessors are named in the DPA.
EU cloud, self-hosted
Models and data run in a German or EU data centre under my contract or yours. The only subprocessor is the hosting provider — named in the DPA.
Your own servers
Installed on your hardware, on request without any internet connection. There are no subprocessors; remote access only under your rules.
Technical and organisational measures (TOMs) and the DPA template are available on request. For financial institutions: the DORA datasheet covers the regulatory classification of the Sentinel validation layer.
Commitments with numbers
| Service | Commitment |
|---|---|
| Reply to enquiries | Personal, within 24 hours on business days |
| Fixed-price offer | Within 48 hours of a project description |
| Response time in the maintenance package | Agreed individually in the retainer contract, matched to the system’s criticality; reachable by phone and email |
| Review cadence in the maintenance package | Quarterly review with the system’s quality metrics |
| During the project | Working software every week and one fixed meeting per week |
What keeps running after the project
The concrete numbers for your case come out of the Readiness Check — the structure is always the same:
| Cost type | Cloud API | EU cloud | Own servers |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-off | — | Setup | Hardware (GPU servers) + setup |
| Running, usage-based | API fees per processed request | — | — |
| Running, fixed | — | Monthly server costs | Power, rack space, depreciation |
| Maintenance (optional) | Maintenance package (retainer) from €1,500/month — monitoring, updates, response times; cancellable monthly | ||
The fair question: what if a single person is unavailable?
Tippel is deliberately a one-person company — you work with the engineer who writes the code. I answer the availability risk with handover capability, not reassurance:
Handover-ready from week one
From the start, you hold working, documented software in your own repositories. Any competent engineer can take over — no proprietary black box.
Standard stack, your infrastructure
Open, widely used tools instead of homegrown frameworks. Deployment is described reproducibly, credentials live with you — as do source code and rights.
For your vendor form
| Company | Tippel — sole proprietorship, owner Lukas Friedrich |
| Address | Kampweg 4, 34369 Hofgeismar, Germany |
| Tax number | 026 819 040 02 |
| Commercial register | Not registered (sole proprietorship) |
| Contact | Lukas Friedrich · info@tippel.ai · +49 178 5879849 |
| References | Bluerope Consult GmbH (client project), KomplAI and Foliovo (own products, live) — details |
- DPA templateData processing agreement per Art. 28 GDPRon request
- TOM overviewTechnical and organisational measureson request
- Sample readiness reportAnonymised sample of the check deliverableon request
- DORA datasheetRegulatory classification of the Sentinel validation layeronline
