Cluster Audit
from $2,500 fixed price per cluster
The cheapest way to find out how bad it really is. Fixed scope, fixed price, no obligation to continue.
Pricing
Published tiers, published starting prices
Everyone else in this market quotes on request. That is not a policy, it is a pricing strategy — the number depends on how much they think you can pay. Ours depends on cluster size, failure domains, and whether you want us on call. Here are the tiers and where each one starts.
How to read this
Everything below is a start-from figure, not a quote. It holds for a
straightforward cluster on hardware you own, in one datacentre, with a defined failure
domain. The list at the bottom of this page is what moves it.
Build engagement
from $15,000 per project
Design, implement, harden, hand over. You keep the code and the runbooks.
Team training
from $14,000 per cohort
3-day hands-on cohort on your own hardware. Kubernetes, PostgreSQL HA, Ceph, or Slurm. Your cluster, your data, your people.
Three SLA tiers
A managed contract covers the cluster, not the application. We publish the response targets we can hold ourselves to, including which tier does not include out-of-hours response — because a tier that promises everything at one price is a tier that quietly disappoints.
Essential
99.9% uptime target
from $1,900 /cluster/month
- Monitoring stack deployed and tuned
- Business-hours incident response (PT)
- Monthly patch cycle
- Quarterly capacity report
Not included
- Out-of-hours response
- Failover drills
Business
99.95% uptime target
from $3,600 /cluster/month
- Everything in Essential
- 16×5 incident response
- Quarterly failover drill with report
- Restore-from-backup drill
- Named engineer, direct line
Not included
- Contractual 15-minute response
Mission-Critical
99.99% uptime target
from $7,900 /cluster/month
- Everything in Business
- 24×7 follow-the-sun response
- Contractual 15-min response target
- Monthly chaos drill
- Dedicated runbook ownership
- Capacity headroom guarantee
GPU / HPC node management
from $220 /GPU node/month
Priced per node, not per GPU card. Includes driver/fabric health, scheduler tuning, and utilisation reporting.
Retainer / emergency support
from $4,000 /month
A prepaid hour pool you can drain anytime. For teams who build themselves but want a senior engineer one message away.
Multipliers, stated up front
Most of these are things that make the engineering genuinely harder. We list them rather than discovering them halfway through your project and issuing a change order.
- Network device clusters — firewall pairs, switch stacks, MLAG pairs, SAN fabrics — are priced as clusters in their own right. A firewall is not a free add-on to the Kubernetes cluster behind it.
- Failure domains: multi-rack, multi-site, or dual-site active/active adds engineering time.
- Regulated environments (PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP-adjacent) add evidence-collection overhead.
- Air-gapped or no-outbound-internet environments require an offline package and on-site access.
- Migrations from live systems are scoped with a rollback drill included — always priced separately.
What the market charges — and what it doesn't include
Cloud and platform vendors publish control-plane prices. Every one of these numbers is infrastructure only; none of them includes a person. That gap is what we sell into.
| Reference | Published price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| AKS control plane, Standard | $73 / month per cluster | Infrastructure only. No human included. |
| AKS Premium / LTS | $438 / month per cluster | Still infrastructure only. |
| DigitalOcean DOKS, HA control plane | $40 / month | Infrastructure only. |
| European managed K8s, HA control plane | €98 / month | Infrastructure only. |
| Typical 3-node production cluster, all-in | $250–$400 / month | Excludes every hour of human work. |
Publicly listed vendor pricing as of 2026. Included for calibration only — we are not affiliated with any of these vendors and prices change.
What is not in any of these prices
Hardware and licences
You buy them or you already own them. We take no margin on hardware and we do not resell licences.
Third-party vendor support contracts
If a fix requires the storage or hypervisor vendor, that case is theirs, not ours.
Application work
Code, dashboards, schema design and business logic stay with your team. We will tell you exactly what we need from them.
Legal and compliance certification
We implement controls and produce evidence. An accredited auditor certifies.
Discounts for equity, deferral, or "exposure"
We are paid in money. If budget is the constraint, take the audit report and shop it around — it is yours.
Get an actual number
Thirty minutes, your architecture, and we'll give you a range with the assumptions written down. If we're not the right fit, that call is where you find out — cheaply.