Unlimited DevOps requests from $2,999/month
No recruiting · No overhead · No contracts · Cancel anytime
See why teams are switching from hiring to subscribing, or pick a time on this page
$300K+/year
Pros
Cons
Best for: Companies with constant, heavy DevOps needs and big budgets
From $2,999/mo
Pros
Cons
Best for: Startups, growing companies, and anyone who wants DevOps done right without the full-time cost
$150-300/hour
Pros
Cons
Best for: One-off tasks with clear specs
No hidden fees. No surprises. Cancel anytime.
Perfect for startups and small teams
For large organizations
Hiring is not wrong, it is just rarely the fastest or cheapest way to get DevOps done. A subscription wins in the situations most teams actually find themselves in.
DevOps work is bursty by nature. You need heavy lifting during a cloud migration, a launch, or a compliance push, then far less once the pipelines are stable. A full-time engineer costs the same $20,000 to $25,000 a month whether the queue is full or empty, so you end up paying premium salary for idle time. A subscription matches spend to demand: you queue as much as you need when it is busy and pause when it is quiet, with unused days carried over.
DevOps-as-a-Service also beats hiring on breadth. One person cannot be an expert in AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and security all at once, yet real infrastructure needs all of them. With a service you tap a team that covers the whole stack, so a Kubernetes autoscaling problem and an IAM hardening task get handled by the right specialist instead of one overstretched generalist. If you want that model as a deeper ongoing engagement, our DevOps as a Service, DevOps consulting services and managed DevOps services build on the same foundation.
Finally, it beats hiring on speed and risk. There is no 3 to 6 month recruiting cycle, an agreed onboarding plan and documented handover. For a fuller framework on this decision, read our guide on DevOps for startups: build vs buy.
If several of these describe your team, a subscription or a fractional engineer will serve you better than a $300K full-time hire right now.
If you cannot keep a full-time engineer busy every week, you are paying six figures for idle time. Match the spend to the actual workload instead.
Recruiting a senior DevOps engineer takes 3 to 6 months. If a launch or migration cannot wait that long, a subscription lets you agree a scoped start date without a full-time hire.
AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform, monitoring, and security are a lot to ask of one hire. A team covers all of them without gaps.
If one engineer leaves, their knowledge of your infrastructure leaves too. A service keeps documented context across a team.
Fully loaded, a senior hire runs $250K to $300K annually. At $2,999 to $4,999 a month you get senior work without betting the runway.
Somewhere between freelancers and a full-time salary sits the option most growing teams actually want. Explore a fractional DevOps engineer, weigh the numbers in fractional DevOps vs a full-time hire, or compare plans on our pricing page.
Submit requests anytime. Agree delivery capacity and staffed support before your plan starts, so everyone knows who owns the next step.
Startup includes one active request at a time; Business includes two. Both allow unlimited queued requests. Enterprise concurrency is agreed in the scope before work starts.
For a small, scoped request, our delivery target is about 48 hours after work starts. Queue time, missing access, approvals and complex work can extend delivery. We agree an estimate before starting and split larger work into milestones. This is a delivery target, not an incident response SLA.
We work with teams in any timezone and accept requests 24/7. Before service starts, we agree the staffed support window, timezone, communication channel and escalation contacts. Out-of-hours human response, including a staffed 24/7 rota, requires a separately agreed scope and confirmed availability.
Before onboarding, we agree incident priorities, escalation contacts and the staffed coverage window. A production outage is urgent; degraded service and routine changes have different priorities. Any response target covers acknowledgement and triage during the agreed coverage, not a guaranteed resolution time. Automated monitoring can run continuously; human on-call response is only included when explicitly scoped and staffed.
Your onboarding scope records support hours, priority definitions, escalation contacts, any response targets, maintenance responsibilities and exclusions. Cloud-provider outages and third-party dependencies can affect recovery time.
Pick a time for a free 15-minute call. No pitch, just honest advice on whether InstaDevOps is right for your team.
No commitment required · Just 15 minutes of your time · open the calendar in a new tab