Deferred Payment,
Deferred Equity,
or Bust

The only startup incubator that puts your success first — with zero upfront costs.

The Helios Startup Incubator is pleased to announce a unique, one-of-a-kind partnership program that’s designed to bring your dream into reality. It’s called the “Deferred Payment, Deferred Equity, or Bust” program. Helios is a Startup Incubator platform. We’re specialists in starting or build brand new apps and taking them from “zero to sixty” in record time. Maybe you’ve heard of Replit or Fusion— anyone can build an app! But are these prototype-level apps any good? Do they have what it takes to really be production-ready apps?
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🚀 The Helios Startup Incubator is now accepting applications

We're specialists in taking brand new apps from "zero to sixty" in record time.

The AI Coding Revolution Has Problems

Problem #1: Vendor Lock-in

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.

Problem #2: Mass Amateurization

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.

Helios Solves Both Problems

Professional development meets startup innovation

How It Works

1

Apply & Get Accepted

We accept applications on a rolling basis. No complex processes.

2

Receive Investment

If accepted, helios invests $5,000 - $50,000 as an angel investment in your startup.

3

Start Building

We get to work immediately using AI-assisted coding and proven techniques.

💰 You Pay Nothing Up Front!

Instead, you + Helios make an A, B, C agreement — decide your payment model later!

Win-Win

A

Cash Buy-out
DEFERRED PAYMENT

We track coding hours at $500/hour. You see exactly what you've "spent" in our dashboard.

You pay only for senior developer coding time — never for meetings or overhead.

B

Equity Buy-out
DEFERRED EQUITY

When you secure your first investor, we take equity equal to the dollar amount of Option A.

Perfect if you want to keep us involved in your growing company.

C

Bust!
NO OBLIGATIONS

If you cease working on your project or don't secure an investor, you owe us nothing.

Keep your data (but not the code). You're free to go, no strings attached.
A: Cash buy-out (“deferred payment”). As we build your product, we will keep track of the hours spent coding, accruing a payment-deferred bill at our hourly rate of $500/hour. You get to see your total accrued timesheets in our dashboard, so you know exactly how much you’ve “spent” on the app. You pay only for coding time with a senior developer, never for project management, meetings, or other overhead. B: Equity buy-out (“deferred equity”). When you secure your first investor, you and the investor have the option to offer Helios Dev Shop an equity stake in your company. This makes a lot of sense if you like working with us and you want to keep us involved in the project. Helios will take an equity state equal to the dollar amount of the cash buy-out (option A), based on the investment made in your company. In other words, we are agnostic about (and not deeply concerned with) valuing your company while you are fundraising. That’s a conversation between you & your investor. C: Bust! If you cease working on your project or don’t secure an investor, you owe us nothing. You are free to go and even keep your data in your app (Not the code.)

This deal is a game changer for the cash-starved startup landscape.

🚀

Why Is This Revolutionary?

The Founder's Dilemma

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.

What AI Can't Do:

Keep founders focused on building the right thing. That's where Helios comes in with our validation-focused process.

🎯 Validation, Validation, Validation

Using Helios, CEOs follow a streamlined process with two-way market research insights and user feedback cycles

Frequently Asked Questions

During the exploration phase, who hosts the codebase?

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.

Is this code portable? Do I own it and can I host it myself?

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.