From $2,999/month
Pause or cancel anytime · 48-hour turnaround · Senior engineers
See if a DevOps retainer is right for your team
$150-400/hour
~$24K-64K/month
Unpredictable bills. Every Slack message and meeting costs money.
$10K-50K per project
~Varies wildly
Scope creep. Change orders. The final invoice is always higher.
From $2,999/month
~$2,999-$4,999/month
One flat fee. Unlimited requests. No surprises. Ever.
VPC, EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, CloudFront - full AWS stack management
Cluster setup, deployments, scaling, monitoring, troubleshooting
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins - automated build and deploy
Terraform, CloudFormation - reproducible, version-controlled infra
Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch - full observability
IAM, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, hardening
Reserved instances, right-sizing, waste elimination - save 30-60%
Cloud migration, containerization, architecture modernization
All plans include unlimited requests
Less than 20 hours of consulting
Perfect for startups and small teams
Tailored to your needs
For large organizations
A monthly retainer replaces the hourly meter with a simple, predictable subscription. Here is exactly what happens from the day you sign up.
Choose Startup at $2,999/month for one active request at a time, or Business at $4,999/month for two in parallel. You get immediate access to a private board where every request lives. No onboarding fees, no setup calls you have to schedule around, no minimum contract.
Add everything you need done, from a one-off AWS cost audit to a full Kubernetes migration. There is no cap on the number of requests. We work through the queue in priority order, one or two at a time depending on your plan, and you re-order it whenever priorities shift.
A senior engineer picks up the top request and ships it, with an average 48-hour turnaround on most tasks. Larger projects get broken into clear milestones so you always see progress. The same team stays on your account, so context carries over month to month like it would with a full-time hire.
Quiet month? Pause and your unused days carry over. Busy quarter? Bump up to Business for parallel delivery. You are never billed by the hour and never charged for idle time. If you want the same model with a deeper ongoing engagement, our managed DevOps services and DevOps as a Service plans build on the exact same retainer foundation.
The sticker price of a full-time DevOps engineer is only the start. Here is how the two models compare once you add up the true annual cost.
A senior DevOps engineer in the US commands a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000. Add benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, software licenses, and recruiting fees, and the fully loaded cost climbs to $250,000 to $300,000 per year. That is roughly $20,000 to $25,000 every month, and you pay it whether the workload is heavy or the pipeline is quiet. You also carry the risk: if that one engineer leaves, your infrastructure knowledge walks out the door with them. We break the full math down in our guide on how much a DevOps engineer really costs.
A retainer flips the equation. At $2,999 to $4,999 per month, you get senior expertise across the entire DevOps stack for a fraction of a single salary. There is no idle time to fund, no benefits or recruiting overhead, and no single point of failure, because a team maintains your context. For most startups and growing teams, DevOps work is bursty: intense during a launch or migration, then light for weeks. A retainer matches spend to that reality instead of paying a flat six-figure salary for uneven demand. Our breakdown of fractional DevOps versus a full-time hire walks through when each model wins.
The rule of thumb: hire full time only when you have constant, 40-hour-a-week DevOps demand and the budget to match. Below that threshold, a retainer or a fractional DevOps engineer delivers the same technical outcomes for far less. Compare the tiers side by side on our pricing page.
Book a free 15-minute call to discuss your DevOps needs and see if a retainer makes sense for your team.
No commitment required · Just 15 minutes of your time