DevOps Accelerator for Startups

We charge a fraction of what it costs to do it in-house and deliver it in half the time or faster. Check out our calculator just to see how much it can cost to build your own cloud infrastructure. Make sure you review some of the risks of doing it yourself.

 We practice “agile” development. We charge a flat fee per sprint but allow for scope changes (which are billed separately) at customer request. A typical engagement consists of 6-8 sprints ranging in 1-2 weeks in duration.

We can start as soon as you sign our Statement of Work. Typically we see this process take 2-3 weeks from the first introductory call to the start of our engagement. 

Here's our checklist we'll need to complete before we can start.

We can kick off the initial introductory call immediately, so please make sure that you schedule it today. 

After talking with you and assessing if we're a proper fit, we'll execute a Mutual NDA and then send over an Engagement Workbook so we can gather all the requirements for your project and estimate the cost.

We believe in total transparency.

For this reason, you can expect no hidden fees from us.

IMPORTANT: Depending on the features you want to be implemented, certain third-party software subscriptions may be required (SaaS).

We do not include these costs in our contract because they are negotiated between your company and the vendor. Sometimes you may qualify for “startup” pricing.

Examples include:

• AWS
• Datadog
• NewRelic
• Sumologic
• Splunk
• Codefresh
• Teleport
• Kubecost
• Mailgun
• PagerDuty
• Pingdom

Anyone is free to fork our repositories and try themselves, but our support eliminates the guesswork and shortens the time it takes to implement correctly.

Think of it like this: anyone can walk into a hardware store and pick up the materials to build a house. Very few people can build a house that won't fall down if they don't have the experience of using all the tools and hardware correctly. We fill the gap by providing the knowledge and experience to get you where you want to be faster than doing it yourself.

Of course! We can't wait to show you what it can do.

Book your appointment today.

Yes, we've worked with enterprises like Globe Life (Fortune 500), Checkatrade, and RMS.com.

Cloud Posse's typical engagement is for greenfield projects.

The typical duration of our initial rollout is 3-4 months, broken down into 2-week sprints. Each sprint is focused on specific deliverables that are summarized in this list: https://cloudposse.com/what-we-do/

The whole package is recommended but not every item on this list is required to be delivered in every engagement, this is per-customer requirements. We work with your team to help them own the solution we build together once the engagement winds down, but we're always here to help!

Community support is available through our internal and public Slack communities (slack.sweetops.com) and our public Office Hours are available every Wednesday at 11:30 AM Pacific Time, you can also listen to previous sessions on our podcast or on our YouTube channel.

After an engagement ends, we offer optional ongoing support, and starting new projects is always an option as well

Our experience ensures you reach your goals in record time. Time is money. Salaries are by far the biggest cost for most startups. Think about how much you would pay to do this in-house and combine that with how long it will take you. During that time, your teams will be blocked or at the very least slowed down. Plus, you don't even have a predictable outcome. You can easily quantify this as your opportunity cost.

Our solution will pay for itself. You get a predictable solution delivered in record time for a fair price. Your engineers will be unblocked sooner and you'll be able to move faster.

Make sure you include all costs associated with your project.

• What is the cost of recruiting your team?
• What is your team’s fully-loaded cost? 
• How long will it take to build and train the team?
• Will they stick around long enough to see the project through?
• What happens when everyone goes on holiday or takes a vacation?
• Will you have enough work for them when the project is over?

Our total project costs predictable. You'll know upfront what to expect and there are no surprises.

It depends. Your best bet is to schedule a discovery call with us so we can go over your specific concerns. Assuming your software runs on Linux and that you're able to make any necessary code changes to ensure your applications are “12 Factor App” compliant, there's a very high likelihood we'll be able to help you out.

We have a very specific mission, which means we may not be a good fit for all companies.

1. Companies who are too small (1-2 engineers) may struggle with the upkeep of managing their own infrastructure.
2. Companies who do not commit any in-house resources to learn the new software stack will have a tough time (you own it after all!)
3. Companies who prefer to use different tools than we prescribe may run into integration challenges (we recommend what we know works)

If any of these sound familiar, please discuss with us before proceeding.

Here are some additional resources you can review:

1. Our GitHub is where we publish over 140 terraform modules we've written and open-sourced under the Apache 2 software license. Our repos see over 11K unique visitors every single day and have over 5000 stars. We receive dozens of Pull Requests every week.
2. Our Reviews are glowing both from our customers and from our community.
3. Our Community will tell you how much we've helped them. You can scan through all of our archives to see what they say.
4. Our YouTube Channel showcases many of our presentations and webinars
5. Our Office Hours Recordings demonstrate our depth of knowledge and commitment to help others.
6. Our Service Catalog is what lets us rapidly deploy the applications you see in our demos and is regularly updated.
7. Our Work is Cited all over the place.

What’s it costing your business if you wait?

The longer you wait, the more time & effort you'll waste on maintenance rather than innovation. The more tech debt you'll amass. The more opportunities you'll miss.

Your developers will be less productive, which means you'll be paying more while getting less done in return.

The sooner you streamline your operations the faster you will move:

1. Reduce your opportunity cost and capitalize on the investment sooner
2. Release more features to customers faster
3. Control operating costs to do more for less

Not to mention, your developers will love you for making their lives easier. The last thing developers want is to do things by hand.

When you hire Cloud Posse, you're buying an outcome that few others can provide. What a company is really buying from Cloud Posse is an end-to-end solution that includes time for implementation and integration. This is a solution that has cost our customers millions of dollars to implement and we are selling for a tiny fraction of the cost to implement it in-house.

We are not a traditional “DevOps as a Service” company that only does the grunt work; we provide thought leadership combined with expert execution and implementation. We have chosen to use an “Open Source” licensing model to simplify the software distribution because we provide 10x the value in our implementation. 

During the course of our engagement, our customers have direct access to our team with tremendous experience in cloud architecture & implementation. Companies hire us to implement in a span of only 3-4 months would take even the most senior experienced team DevOps engineers years to develop, which makes our offering insanely affordable by comparison.  By partnering with Cloud Posse, you're sparing all the hard “lessons learned” to achieve a greater outcome in a shorter amount of time with less risk.

You will find the industry-standard rate for experienced independent contractors/freelancers is around $150-250/hr. Note, when you hire freelancers they don't bring to the table the unparalleled library of code and experience that you get when you partner with Cloud Posse. We put our best foot forward on GitHub so you see exactly what you’re getting. Plus, freelancers and employees cannot offer business continuity, which leaves your company with no one to turn to when/if they leave or go on vacation. While a company might shave off a little bit on the hourly rate by going with an independent contractor, it's several orders of magnitude more expensive to implement a custom solution that is remotely comparable to what we offer; that solution will have greater uncertainty and result in greater risk for your business. 

• Gruntwork doesn't provide open access to all their modules, they are a subscription service. Cloud Posse open sources everything.
• All of our code is in GitHub and can be forked and used with no concerns about licensing issues (APACHE2).
• Gruntwork does not help with hands-on implementation. That's left up to you.
• We provide a comprehensive project plan consisting of hundreds of implementation tasks and design decisions that we execute together with your team.
• Our Slack community is free for anyone to join, not just paying customers.
• Because our work is Open Source, there's a lower barrier to getting started. That's why it's in use by thousands and thousands of companies. We receive dozens of Pull Requests every week enhancing our modules and fixing bugs.

Our goal is not to sell you on a solution that you don’t need or one that will frankly be overkill for you. We've worked with several customers that were pre-product and helped them launch successfully. What's important is that owning your infrastructure needs to be a competitive advantage. We work best with companies that have some experience running their apps in containers, using AWS in some capacity, companies that flexible in adopting the open-source tools we deliver as part of our solution.

Your best bet is to schedule a discovery call and we'll quickly assess if we're a good fit for your company.

Unfortunately, we're not able to take on small engagements. You can, however, join us every single week for 100% free “Office Hours”—where we seek to answer your questions. Just register for an invitation.

We hold our “Office Hours” every Wednesday at 11:30 am PT via Zoom. We're typically 30+ people on the call and all skill levels are welcome.

Checkout our past recordings on YouTube or subscribe to our Podcast.

We work with companies who need to own their infrastructure as their competitive advantage.

Our customers are typically post-Series A technology startups who are seeing success in the market and need to accelerate their DevOps adoption in order to take their company to the next level.

They are backed by some of the biggest names in the industry and are solving really difficult problems with technology.