Four ways to work with us #
Every one of them is scoped in writing and priced before work begins. No hourly meters, no discovery phase you pay for, no scope that quietly expands.
01. Fixed-scope assessment #
One to two weeks. Single fixed fee.
A production readiness review, a cost optimisation sprint, or an architecture review before you commit to a large build. You get a written findings document with prioritised recommendations, each carrying an estimate of what it is worth and what it costs to do.
This is the cheapest way to buy senior judgement, and the right starting point for most engagements. It also gives both sides evidence about whether the working relationship fits before anyone commits to a quarter.
02. Fixed-price project #
Two weeks to three months. Fixed price against a written scope.
A landing zone, a migration, a CI/CD pipeline, a disaster recovery design. The statement of work defines deliverables, timeline, price and acceptance criteria before anything starts.
If we scoped it wrong, we absorb it. If you change what you want, we price the change separately and you agree it in writing first.
03. Embedded delivery #
Ongoing, alongside your engineers.
We build with your team rather than in a corner, document as we go, and hand over with runbooks. This is how most of our project work actually runs, because a platform only one consultancy understands is a liability rather than an asset.
It requires your team's time. If you need someone to own an outcome without involving your engineers at all, we are the wrong shape and will say so.
04. Fractional platform retainer #
Monthly, fixed hours.
Where there is no in-house platform engineer to hand over to, we stay on as your platform function: monitoring, alerting, patching, cost review and the architectural decisions that come up.
This is often the right answer for a team of eight to twenty engineers — senior platform capability without carrying a senior platform salary before you need to.
What we will not do #
We will not take a percentage of savings on cost work. That model creates an incentive to find numbers that look good in a first-quarter dashboard rather than ones that survive a year, and it puts us on the wrong side of the table when the honest answer is "leave this alone".
We will not bill hourly. It rewards the slowest possible delivery and makes the invoice a surprise.
We will not quote before we understand the problem. That is what the free thirty minutes is for.
What you own #
Everything we build is Infrastructure as Code, in your repository, under your account. There is no
lock-in to us, by design. If you want to take it in-house in a year, the handover is a git clone.