Sellavie.ai retention, failover, and queue APIs

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.