Day rates and how engagements are billed

Packaged engagements are quoted as a fixed fee. The fee is set in writing at the end of Discovery & Scoping, once the estate has been read, and it does not move because the work turned out to be harder than expected. That risk is priced into the quote, which is the point of doing Discovery first.

Day rates apply to work outside an agreed scope: a change order you request mid-engagement, an extension past the agreed end, or hours beyond a retainer’s monthly allocation. They are published so that a change order arrives with a number you have already seen rather than one invented at the point where you have least room to argue.

Migration execution is the one place a day rate is a primary billing mode rather than an exception, alongside per-VM pricing within a complexity band. The reasoning is on the migration page: the first wave costs a multiple of the last, so a flat rate across an estate is either padded at the front or loss-making at the back.

The fractional Cloud & Platform Architect retainer is $7,500 a month for roughly six hours a week of advisory time. It suits organisations that need architectural judgment available continuously rather than a project delivered.

$2,200 a day is $275 an hour, which is upper quartile for independent cloud architecture without reaching firm pricing. Published benchmarks put senior independent cloud architects between $150 and $300 an hour, with migration specialisations at the top of that band.

Assessment and cost work carry the higher $2,400 rate because they are judgment-dense and short — you are buying the conclusion, not the hours it took to reach it. Workshops price higher per delivered day because the rate absorbs the architecture read and lab build that happen before delivery, and because the value scales with headcount rather than with time.

Five Google Cloud Professional certifications and a 2,000+ VM migration programme are what defend the upper-quartile position. The full list is on the about page.