Cloud Assessment

Two weeks at the published floor for the cloud practice. The floor covers up to 3 distinct systems, models or accounts; beyond that, each further block of up to 3 systems adds 10 percent, capped at 30 percent, and more than 12 systems needs a scoping call.

Two weeks buys the shorter of the practice's shapes, chosen at the scoping call: the Cost attribution and FinOps review (the site scopes it at 2–3 weeks, diagnostic) or the Platform and delivery review (2–4 weeks, assessment). The cost shape finds out where the money actually goes before anything is changed: tag hygiene, shared-resource allocation, and per-team or per-feature unit economics — cost per tenant, per request, per thousand tokens. The platform shape assesses CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and environment topology against delivery speed and blast radius together, including the identity model: who and what can reach production, and how much of that is standing privilege that should be temporary.

Coverage is AWS, GCP and Azure, plus Kubernetes, Terraform and the managed data and inference services. We will not quote a saving before looking, and you should be wary of anyone who does; if the honest answer is that the estate is already lean, that is the finding, and it arrives in week two rather than month four.

Fixed fee and fixed window, scoped with a written deliverable and an end date agreed before it starts. No retainers you cannot exit and no findings held back for a follow-on sale. We are not a reseller, we hold no marketplace margin, and we do not take a percentage of what we save you — there is no upside for us in recommending a commitment you should not make. What we deliver is yours, so if you never call us again, everything still works.

The price is the published floor for the practice and its status is confirmed: PinkCloud quotes from this figure. It is a floor rather than a flat fee — the scope described above buys it, and while we are scoping, more systems, an expedited start or compliance evidence quote above it, so a binding quote can come out above an indicative one. The floors are published so you can rule us in or out without a call, and engagements are quoted against scope, never against what we think you can pay. The floor is priced for senior-only staffing: the people who scope the engagement are the people who deliver it, and the practice floors sit deliberately above the entry product rather than being discounted to meet it. An indicative quote is valid 14 days and is never binding; a binding quote follows a scoping call and is approved by a named person at PinkCloud.

Assumptions: senior-only staffing; remote delivery unless on-site is agreed; the client provides access within 3 business days of the start; taxes excluded, as the Service offer published on the practice page also states; the fixed fee is an agreed budget of 120 hours of senior time at our published hourly rate.

What the fee buys, and what happens if the work does not fit. Two rules apply at two different times and both hold. Before you sign, while the scope is being sized, the figure is a floor: more systems, an expedited start or compliance evidence quote above it. Once you have signed, the quoted fee and the two-week window hold: if the agreed work proves larger than we estimated, the scope flexes rather than the fee, what comes out is agreed in writing with you, and an overrun is never billed by the hour. The hourly rate is reached only by adding scope — a change request or a separate engagement, agreed in writing before it starts — never by the agreed work turning out to be bigger.

Reliability: every change is assessed for its effect on failure modes as well as its effect on the bill, and reliability constraints are agreed before any optimization work starts.

Confidentiality and staffing: the roster staffing the work is disclosed under NDA before you sign anything. No client is named without written permission and case studies are anonymized by default. What you send is shown only to the people at PinkCloud who will answer, and is never published, used in marketing or shared with other prospects. We do not backfill an engagement with people who were not in the scoping call; when we are full we say so and offer a date.

If a prior Exposure Review turns into a larger engagement, the site states that its fee comes off the first invoice, while the pricing rules list crediting the entry fee against a follow-on as a human decision and a decision record each.

Payment, cancellation and liability terms are agreed in the engagement contract before work starts.