IT Consulting & Optimization

A consulting engagement with us is scoped: usually two to four weeks, fixed price, written deliverable at the end. We don't sell open-ended fractional CTO retainers because we've watched too many of them turn into a slow drift where neither side really knows what's been delivered. If you want ongoing help after the audit, we'll quote it as a separate engagement once you know what you're buying.

The first week is intake. We ask for read-only access to the things we need to look at: AWS or GCP billing console, GitHub or GitLab, the production monitoring tool (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana), vendor contracts in PDF, and a 30-minute call with whoever runs the team day to day. We don't ask for write access to anything in week one. We're looking, not changing.

Weeks two and three are the analysis. Depending on the scope this might be a cost audit (we model the AWS bill against actual usage and flag the 3 to 5 services that are doing 80% of the spend), a stack review (what's in production, what's still maintained, what would we replace and what would we leave alone), or a vendor-proposal second opinion (you've got a quote from a consultancy and you want someone outside the room to read it). We deliver a written report in plain language, ranked by cost-to-benefit, with specific dollar amounts where we can model them.

The last step is a debrief call where we walk you through the report and answer questions. After that you own the document and decide what to do with it. About half our consulting clients hire us to implement one or two of the recommendations afterwards. The other half take the report and run it internally, which is also fine.

Consulting work runs at a different shape than build work, and we price it accordingly. A scoped audit (cost, stack, or vendor) typically runs 4,500 to 8,500 EUR for a two- to three-week engagement, with a written deliverable at the end and one debrief call included. That's the most common engagement size for us. It's small enough that mid-sized teams don't need a procurement cycle, large enough that we can do honest work.

Larger reviews go to 12,000 to 18,000 EUR when we're auditing across infrastructure, security posture, and process. These are usually for clients who've grown fast, inherited a stack from a previous CTO, and want a written baseline before deciding what to keep and what to retire. We schedule those at four to six weeks and split the deliverable into a current-state document and a recommended-state document, so the gap between them becomes the action plan.

We don't do hourly billing for consulting. Every engagement is fixed-price, scoped in writing before we start, and capped at the original quote even if the work runs longer than we estimated. If we genuinely scope wrong, that's our problem, not yours. The exception is if the scope itself changes mid-engagement, in which case we stop, write a change order, and you decide whether to expand or stay within the original brief.