Discovery & Scoping
A fixed quote for an estate nobody has looked at is either padded or a change order waiting to happen. This is the look.
$4,500 fixed · 3–5 days
Why there is no quote before this
Every engagement on this site starts here, and it is the only thing that can be bought without a prior conversation.
The reason is straightforward. Whether your estate needs building or remediating cannot be determined from outside it. A client with nothing needs a build. A client with three years of accumulated projects, partial Terraform, and a network that grew by accretion needs something quite different, and the two look identical on a discovery call.
A firm that quotes without looking is doing one of two things. It is padding the number enough to cover the worst case it can imagine, in which case you overpay. Or it is quoting the good case and planning to raise a change order in week five, in which case you overpay later and from a weaker position, with work already in flight.
Five days and a fixed fee removes the guess from both sides.
What the five days produce
Read-only access throughout. Nothing in your estate is changed during Discovery.
- D1 Current-state review
Organization structure, projects, IAM, network topology, and what is actually running. Read-only access throughout. - D2 Gap analysis
Where the estate sits against the target state you describe, and which gaps are structural rather than cosmetic. - D3 Scope draft
A written scope of work: what would be built or assessed, in what order, with the exclusions named. - D4 Effort estimate
Effort broken down by workstream, with the assumptions each estimate depends on written next to it. - D5 Fixed quote
A fixed price for the engagement, valid for 60 days, with the credit term applied.
The credit term
Half the fee is credited against the engagement if you proceed within 60 days.
Half, not all. Full credit would make this a free sales call, and free sales calls are priced accordingly — they get the attention a free thing gets. Half means the five days are real work with a real deliverable, and it still meaningfully reduces the cost of proceeding.
The three questions people actually ask
Is this just a paid sales call?
No, and the structure is what makes that answer credible rather than an assertion. Half the fee is credited if you proceed, which means proceeding is cheaper but not free — there is no incentive to run a thin engagement and push for the sale.
More importantly, the deliverable is yours whether or not you engage further. You leave with a current-state review, a gap analysis, a written scope, and a fixed quote. A sales call leaves you with a follow-up email.
Why can’t you just quote me?
Because the two most common situations produce the same conversation and completely different numbers. A client with nothing needs a foundation built. A client with a half-finished estate needs parts of it remediated, parts kept, and parts removed — and which is which is not visible from a call.
Anyone who quotes a fixed price for infrastructure work without looking at the infrastructure is pricing the risk of being wrong. That padding is invisible to you and it is not small. The alternative is a low quote followed by change orders, which is worse, because by then the project is in flight and you have nowhere to go.
Five days at a fixed fee is the cheapest way to make the real number knowable.
Can I take the scope document to another firm?
Yes. It is your document and there is nothing in it that stops you.
That is exactly why the credit is half rather than full. A full credit would make this a free scoping service for people intending to shop it, and the price would have to go up elsewhere to cover that. Half is the number that keeps the engagement honest in both directions.
It is a fair question and worth answering straight, because you already suspected the answer. A consultant who gets evasive here is telling you how the rest of the relationship will go.
What Discovery is not
- implementation of any kind — no changes are made to your estate
- a security audit — that is the Architecture & Security Review
- any deliverable you would otherwise pay for inside an engagement
It is also not an engagement in itself. Discovery is the step that determines which engagement you need and what it costs. The engagements are on the services page.
Booking it
Send a short description of your estate and what prompted this. A reply usually comes within one business day, with a date and what access will be needed. Discovery is payable up front.