What does a cloud migration with you actually cost?

Migrations are phased and milestone-priced. We start with a Technical Assessment ($50,000, one to two weeks) that produces a real number for your situation, not a marketing average. The migration itself is then priced phase-by-phase against the plan you sign off on, no open-ended hourly bills, and you can stop at any phase boundary.

AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, which one will you use?

The one your team can run. We've shipped production workloads on all three. The right cloud is usually the one that matches your existing identity provider, your procurement footprint, and the operating skills you already have. We'll recommend a specific provider in the Assessment, with the reasoning, not a coin-flip.

How long does a cloud migration typically take?

A scoped lift-and-shift can be eight to twelve weeks. A full migration with re-architecture, decommissioning, and operating-model handover is closer to a year. We deliver in milestone-bound phases so you see real progress every few weeks rather than betting the business on a single cutover date. The Assessment gives you the honest number for your scope.

Will you take over running the cloud after migration, or hand it back?

We hand it back. Knowledge transfer is built into every phase via pair programming, documentation, and runbooks. Some clients keep us on a smaller monthly retainer for steady-state platform support, but the default is that your team owns and operates the platform we ship.

Do you handle cost engineering / FinOps separately?

Cost engineering is part of the migration, not a separate engagement. We've taken PIXLISE from $3,500/month to $900/month and similar moves across other clients. FinOps practices, tagging, chargeback, killswitches, get set up alongside the workload moves so the bill doesn't drift the moment we leave.

What's your approach when the existing system can't be cleanly migrated?

Strangler-fig replacement. The new system is built alongside the old one, with traffic and workloads gradually moved across as components prove themselves. Most failed cloud migrations fail at the operating-model layer rather than the technical one, so the plan always includes decommissioning, ownership handover, and the cost envelope alongside the technical work.

Capability · Cloud & Infrastructure

Production cloud infrastructure that pays for itself.

NASA-grade engineering applied to the cloud platforms your business runs on, migration, platform setup, cost engineering, observability. Designed to actually finish, because most migrations don't fail for technical reasons.

Production-first · Cost-engineered · Infrastructure as code · Knowledge transfer baked in

What we build for you

Six places we make cloud earn its keep.

Production-ready architecture

Built to handle 100K+ users from day one. No costly rewrite when traction hits. Already on an older stack? That is where legacy modernisation comes in.

AWS / GCP / Azure that passes enterprise audits.

One-command deployments

Push to production with one command. No manual configs, no DevOps PhD required.

Terraform / Pulumi / CDK, your choice.

Enterprise security from day one

SOC 2-ready infrastructure so you pass audits when Series A or procurement asks.

HTTPS, encryption at rest, RBAC, audit logs.

Real-time monitoring & alerts

Know about problems before your customers do. Comprehensive logging and alerting on every service.

Datadog / CloudWatch / Grafana with on-call rotation.

Cost optimization built in

Auto-scaling that saves $15K, 30K/mo against over-provisioned baselines. Pixlise went from $3,500/mo to $900/mo.

Pay for what you use; scale when you need it.

Complete CI/CD pipeline

Ship updates daily with automated testing. Iterate at speed without breaking production.

GitHub Actions / CircleCI with automated rollbacks.

The real cost of "building it later"

Postponing infrastructure isn’t free.

The companies that tell themselves they’ll “handle infrastructure when we scale” usually end up paying many times over. Here’s how the bill arrives.

01 / Budget and timeline pressure

You’re spending $50K, 100K/mo on senior engineers who spend 60% of their time on DevOps instead of your product. That’s 6, 9 months of budget wasted before delivering customer value.

02 / The MVP that never launches

Your technical founder builds a monolith on their laptop. Works great, until the investor demo, when the database crashes. Or your first 100 users arrive and nothing scales. Complete rewrite needed.

03 / Competitive advantage lost

While you’re still debugging Kubernetes configs, your competitor launched. They have 10,000 users and a funding round closing. You’re explaining why you need three more months.

04 / Series A questions you can't answer

“How do you plan to scale to 100K users?” “What’s your security posture?” “Can you pass a SOC 2 audit?” When the honest answer is “we’ll figure it out,” investors walk.

Our framework

Step by step, concept to cloud.

A proven five-phase methodology that moves your project from concept to a production cloud platform. No multi-year death marches; milestone reviews at every step.

Phase 01

Architectural review and scoping

We map the system you have, identify the highest-leverage moves, and propose target architecture with phased delivery milestones.

Phase 02

Foundations and IaC

VPC, IAM, secrets, networking, CI/CD pipelines defined in code. Production discipline wired in from sprint one.

Phase 03

Migration or build

Strangler-fig replacement of monoliths, or greenfield platform setup. Zero-downtime cutover strategies, milestone reviews at every step.

Phase 04

Cost engineering and ops

Right-size, right-schedule, eliminate idle compute. Observability, runbooks, SLOs your team can defend.

Phase 05

Handover and ownership

Documentation, paired programming, cloud accounts under your control. When we leave, your team owns and operates everything.

01
Phase 01

Architectural review and scoping

We map the system you have, identify the highest-leverage moves, and propose target architecture with phased delivery milestones.
02
Phase 02

Foundations and IaC

VPC, IAM, secrets, networking, CI/CD pipelines defined in code. Production discipline wired in from sprint one.
03
Phase 03

Migration or build

Strangler-fig replacement of monoliths, or greenfield platform setup. Zero-downtime cutover strategies, milestone reviews at every step.
04
Phase 04

Cost engineering and ops

Right-size, right-schedule, eliminate idle compute. Observability, runbooks, SLOs your team can defend.
05
Phase 05

Handover and ownership

Documentation, paired programming, cloud accounts under your control. When we leave, your team owns and operates everything.

Recent outcomes

Cloud at mission scale.

NASA / JPL

PIXLISE, Mars Perseverance Rover

Cloud backend for NASA’s PIXL instrument on the Perseverance rover. AWS infrastructure defined in code, deployed by CI/CD, monitored continuously. Cost-engineered under $1,000/mo.

$3,500 → $900/mo

Read case study

Global compliance advisory

Compliance Platform Modernisation

Excel-based compliance operations modernised into a cloud-native services platform with case management. Faster processing, higher accuracy, scalable to new use cases.

4-month delivery

Read case study

Princeton University

Research Data Platform

Cloud platform processing years of data from hundreds of thousands of channels. Fragmented academic research transformed into reproducible, large-scale science.

14 specialists · 18 months

Read case study

Resources for platform decisions.

Decision framework

Build vs. Buy: A Decision Framework for Platform Engineering

Four factors, a decision matrix, common platform decisions, and four case studies, for engineering leaders at mid-size companies.

Read the framework

Questions buyers ask first

The honest answers to what you're about to ask.

What does a cloud migration with you actually cost?: Migrations are phased and milestone-priced. We start with a Technical Assessment ($50,000, one to two weeks) that produces a real number for your situation, not a marketing average. The migration itself is then priced phase-by-phase against the plan you sign off on, no open-ended hourly bills, and you can stop at any phase boundary.
AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, which one will you use?: The one your team can run. We've shipped production workloads on all three. The right cloud is usually the one that matches your existing identity provider, your procurement footprint, and the operating skills you already have. We'll recommend a specific provider in the Assessment, with the reasoning, not a coin-flip.
How long does a cloud migration typically take?: A scoped lift-and-shift can be eight to twelve weeks. A full migration with re-architecture, decommissioning, and operating-model handover is closer to a year. We deliver in milestone-bound phases so you see real progress every few weeks rather than betting the business on a single cutover date. The Assessment gives you the honest number for your scope.
Will you take over running the cloud after migration, or hand it back?: We hand it back. Knowledge transfer is built into every phase via pair programming, documentation, and runbooks. Some clients keep us on a smaller monthly retainer for steady-state platform support, but the default is that your team owns and operates the platform we ship.
Do you handle cost engineering / FinOps separately?: Cost engineering is part of the migration, not a separate engagement. We've taken PIXLISE from $3,500/month to $900/month and similar moves across other clients. FinOps practices, tagging, chargeback, killswitches, get set up alongside the workload moves so the bill doesn't drift the moment we leave.
What's your approach when the existing system can't be cleanly migrated?: Strangler-fig replacement. The new system is built alongside the old one, with traffic and workloads gradually moved across as components prove themselves. Most failed cloud migrations fail at the operating-model layer rather than the technical one, so the plan always includes decommissioning, ownership handover, and the cost envelope alongside the technical work.

Modernising cloud

Enterprise cloud work

Cloud migration, platform consolidation, modernisation. See what working with us looks like as an enterprise buyer.

Visit /for-enterprise

Building cloud-first

Startup cloud work

Cloud platform setup from scratch, baked into your MVP build. See what working with us looks like as a startup founder.

Visit /for-startups

Send Tom the cloud you’re stuck on.

A few lines about the platform, the bill, or the migration you keep putting off. He’ll write back honestly about what to fix first.

Talk to our team