Where do engagements start?
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With an Assessment. $25K–$50K fixed scope, 2–4 weeks. Everything else is downstream of that document.
Is $25K–$50K for an Assessment too much for a company our size?
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For a client spending $5M/year on cloud, a $35K Assessment is 0.7% of annual spend. It typically identifies multiples of its own fee in addressable savings, and it's priced against that outcome, not against the hours. If your cloud spend is under $500K/year, the math doesn't work — and we'll tell you that.
Do we have to commit to more than the Assessment?
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No. The Assessment stands alone. If the numbers don't justify a Pilot, the Assessment is the engagement and we part ways cleanly.
What if the Assessment says we should stay on public cloud?
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Then we tell you that. Selective repatriation means selective. Sometimes the right answer is "keep what you have, here's where the waste actually is."
How do you price Platform Build?
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After Assessment. The scope depends on how many workloads move, how complex the landing zone is, and how much of the platform you want to run yourselves. We won't quote it before we've seen the bill.
Why ranges instead of fixed prices?
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Because bill size and workload complexity vary. Once we've seen the bill and the landing zone, the range locks to a fixed scope. You're never on an open-ended hourly.
What does "infra pass-through" mean?
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Hardware, colo, bandwidth, and cloud spend are separate line items at cost. Our fee is for the work.
Do you require a multi-year commitment?
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No. Every engagement stands on its own. Operate is month-to-month after an initial term.
Do you take equity or work on contingency?
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No. Fees are fees. The savings-share term is the only place we tie our compensation to outcomes.
Can you work with our existing platform team?
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Yes. Most of what we do is pattern and tooling, not replacement. Your team runs it after handoff, or we run it under Operate if you'd rather not.
What if we don't have a platform team?
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Most of our clients don't have a dedicated platform team. That's why Operate exists. We build the platform, then run the steady state so your existing infrastructure engineers can focus on the work only they can do. If you later want to bring operations in-house, we hand off with runbooks and training — no lock-in.
How big are the teams that do this work?
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Smaller than you'd expect. An Assessment is 1–2 people. A Pilot is 2–4. A Platform Build is 4–8. Operate is 1–3 named people plus shared on-call. The firms doing this work for mid-market clients are small, senior shops — not Big Four consultancies. That's a feature, not a limitation.
How do we start?
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Show us the bill that hurts. We reply in plain language.