Sellavie.ai retention, failover, and queue APIs
Tiered retention features, AI failover, queue APIs, and the move from chatbot demo toward SaaS operations.
This was one of the moments where Sellavie started looking less like a chatbot and more like a SaaS product.
The work added tiered retention features, AI failover, queue APIs, a retention test suite, and dashboard wiring.
The AI failover piece
This is the part I think matters most.
If the model path is slow or unavailable, the system needs a fallback story. Without one, the whole product becomes as fragile as its most unstable dependency. A business using Sellavie to handle customer messages cannot have their entire sales workflow go offline because a model endpoint is slow.
So the failover path is not optional infrastructure. It is a product feature — the thing that makes the business's AI dependency acceptable instead of frightening.
Retention as product behavior
Retention is not just a business metric. In a product like Sellavie, it becomes product behavior:
- which features a business can access on which plan
- what the dashboard shows to explain value over time
- what limits apply and how they are communicated
- what changes when a subscription lapses or upgrades
Getting this right meant building it as a real system — tiers, limits, fallback behavior, dashboard feedback, tests — not just adding gates to existing features.
The shift
This phase was a move away from "can it answer?" toward "can the product run?" Those are different engineering questions with different answers.