The only startup incubator that puts your success first — with zero upfront costs.
We're specialists in taking brand new apps from "zero to sixty" in record time.
What the hype around “vibe coding” and instant app builders glosses over is the trap of vendor lock-in.
Vendor lock-in means the code you’re writing only works on one company’s platform. At first, it feels magical—you’re shipping fast, showing off demos, and feeling like you’ve outsmarted traditional development. But the deeper you build, the tighter the chains become. When you finally want to scale, change vendors, or take your stack in-house, you discover the ugly truth: escaping means rewriting everything from scratch.
This is the hidden cost of vibe coding. The short-term thrill of “look, it works!” blinds you to the long-term reality that you’ve built on sand. In real engineering, vendor lock-in has always been treated as a poison pill. Yet tools like Replit, Fusion, and other walled gardens normalize it as part of the deal. By the time you realize you’ve traded freedom for speed, the technical debt is insurmountable and the only way forward is a total rebuild.
Vibes can get you started—but vendor lock-in guarantees you’ll eventually pay for them, and the bill always comes due.
After a year of the “vibe coding frenzy,” the verdict is clearer: you can build something fast with AI copilots, but only if you’re willing to take big risks. The problem isn’t whether the code runs—it often does—it’s that no one is paying attention to architecture, scalability, technical debt, and the messy parts that matter once real users arrive.
The hype celebrates “ship first, fix later,” or the lone hacker spinning up a weekend project with nothing but vibes and ChatGPT. But what happens after the weekend? Amateur vibe coding skips over security, compliance, maintainability, and performance tuning. One overlooked edge case, and the whole thing buckles under pressure.
That’s why serious teams don’t code on vibes—they rely on professionals. AI tools can accelerate development, but only when guided by engineers who know when to trust, when to verify, and when to rebuild. Used well, AI is leverage. Used carelessly, it’s just a fast track to technical debt in neon colors.
Professional development meets startup innovation
We accept applications on a rolling basis. No complex processes.
If accepted, helios invests $5,000 - $50,000 as an angel investment in your startup.
We get to work immediately using AI-assisted coding and proven techniques.
Instead, you + Helios make an A, B, C agreement — decide your payment model later!
We track coding hours at $500/hour. You see exactly what you've "spent" in our dashboard.
When you secure your first investor, we take equity equal to the dollar amount of Option A.
If you cease working on your project or don't secure an investor, you owe us nothing.
This deal is a game changer for the cash-starved startup landscape.
Most founders fail because of inaction. They get lost in delusions of grandeur and never actually build anything.
In the startup world, countering this effect is called having a bias for action.
In other words: When in doubt, doing something is better than doing nothing.
Instead, most inexperienced founders spend a lot of mental energy convincing themselves that finding the right technologist is the thing holding them back.
Founder has great idea, founder believes great idea can be built with a lot of technology, founder goes to find an engineer, founder can’t find any qualified engineer, founder convinces themselves that “if only” they had an engineer, their dream would come true. For non-technical founders, the idea that technology is the bottleneck literally becomes the thing that kills the project.
The irony: Most engineers think coding is the easy part. The hard part is building something people actually want and will pay for. Creating a product that solves a real need, and one that people are willing to pay for.
Our hope is that AI-assisted development will close the gap. It can shorten prototyping time and increase quality output — but only in the hands of experienced developers.
Keep founders focused on building the right thing. That's where Helios comes in with our validation-focused process.
Deployment, hosting, setup, and all the gnarly behind-the-scenes stuff is handled by Helios's white-glove hosting service.
All startups we invest in get the first three months of hosting FREE!
After that: Tiny apps start at $50/month. Medium apps cost $100-$300/month based on your stack size.
Before buy-out: You don't own the codebase, but you DO own your data and can export it anytime.
During exploration, you can't hire other developers to work on it outside Helios. But this is a much better deal than vendor lock-in — those guys want to keep you forever!
After buy-out: Want your code, data, and entire stack? Pay the buyout fee and we'll set everything up on services YOU own. No questions asked. An ownership license is granted giving you complete ownership over your codebase.