Pricing/Published, not "contact us"
Here are the numbers.
Most consultancies hide pricing because the price depends on how much they think you can pay. We'd rather publish a range and spend the first call working out whether you're at the bottom of it or the top.
01 / Audit
Architecture review
$4,800fixed fee · 2 weeks
- Read-only access, no production changes
- 18–25 page written review
- Risk register with dollar estimates
- 90-day remediation roadmap
- 90-minute walkthrough, recorded
- 30-day follow-up call
- No implementation support
- No cost-optimisation work
02 / Project
Scoped engagement
$18,000–$45,000fixed scope · 4–8 weeks
- Everything in the audit
- Cost optimisation, incident readiness or migration
- We do the work, alongside your team
- Changes applied in approved windows
- Runbooks, cost model, decision records
- Two weeks of hypercare after delivery
- No open-ended scope
- No weekend cutovers without a rollback rehearsal
03 / Retainer
Fractional senior
$3,200per month · 20 hours · 3-month minimum
- Monthly review of planned changes
- Postmortem review and rewrite
- Quarterly cost and commitment check
- Email and Slack access, one business day
- Two scheduled calls a month
- Priority for project work
- Not on-call cover
- Unused hours don't roll over
Where you land in the project range: number of environments, number of stateful workloads, and how much of the stack is undocumented. A 12-person team with two environments is at the bottom; a 60-person team with four regions and no diagrams is at the top.
Side by side
The differences that actually matter, not a feature matrix with 40 rows.
| What you get | Audit | Project | Retainer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Written review of current state | Yes | Yes | Quarterly |
| We make changes in your account | No | Yes, in windows | No |
| Someone to ask before you ship | No | During the project | Yes |
| Runbooks and decision records | Outline only | Yes | Reviewed |
| Commitment beyond the engagement | None | None | 3 months |
| Typical decision it answers | "Is this going to break, and what first?" | "Fix it, and show us how." | "Who do we ask about the next three decisions?" |
Terms
The boring part, in four lines
Questions
Things people ask before signing
Why fixed fee instead of hourly?
Because hourly billing rewards slow work, and both sides know it. A fixed fee means we have to be honest about scope on day one, and you never have to audit a timesheet. The trade-off is real: we ask more questions up front than a firm billing by the hour would.
Can we buy five days instead of a whole project?
No. Half a review is enough information to be confidently wrong, which is worse than having no review at all. If $4,800 is out of reach, the retainer at $3,200 is the cheapest way to get a senior opinion on a specific decision.
Do you discount for startups or non-profits?
We keep one slot per quarter at 50% for a non-profit we choose ourselves. We don't take applications for it, and we don't mention it on the invoice. Early-stage startups: no discount, but we'll tell you honestly if you'd be better off spending the money on something else.
What if we need more than 20 hours in a month?
Additional hours are $170 each, billed at month end, and we flag it before we cross the line rather than after. If you're regularly over 30 hours, we'll suggest moving to a project — it's cheaper for you and easier to plan for us.
Are these prices current?
Yes — last reviewed November 2026, and we'll honour a quoted price for 60 days. We raise them roughly once a year, usually in January, and never mid-engagement.
Tell us your monthly cloud spend and what's breaking.
We'll tell you which tier makes sense — including "none of them" if that's the honest answer.