Fixed-price engineering assessments, and the builds that follow them.
For platform, backend, and infrastructure teams. You get the measurement, the reasoning behind it, and a written record you can hand to someone else.
Measure first, from $950. Then build, from $30,000.
The prices · A measurement I took
How the work runs
Nothing gets built here before it gets measured. The measurement comes back written and ranked, in a form you can hand to someone who was not in the room, and when it finds no build worth doing, that is the finding. You are not talked into the next engagement.
Scope, price, and date are agreed in writing before work starts, so you know your number before you commit to anything. A fixed price means the estimate is my problem rather than yours, which is the whole reason the measurement comes first.
What ships is yours on payment: the source, the tests, and documentation someone else can maintain it from. Instruments run inside your environment, and your code does not leave it.
A strickle is the blade you draw across a full measure of grain to strike off the heap, so the measure is honest.
The engagements
Most teams start with a written second opinion for $950 and decide afterward whether there is anything worth measuring further. Builds start at $30,000 and are priced after scoping, but nothing gets built before it gets measured. Everything here is fixed scope and fixed price, agreed in writing before work starts.
One of these is not bought by the engineering team. The continuity assessment is read by an acquirer, a board, or whoever inherits the systems, and it is usually bought because a deal or a resignation put a date on the question.
| Second opinion | $950 · written, no call |
|---|---|
| Written design | $3,500 · ten business days, one revision |
| AI coding effectiveness assessment | $9,500 · measured twice, 28 days apart |
| ingress-nginx exit, proven | from $9,500 · every route, in writing |
| Platform Teardown | $15,000 · three days, your platform |
| Knowledge Continuity Assessment | $15,000 · five days, a company you are buying |
| Backend systems and tooling | from $30,000 |
|---|---|
| Replace the subscription | from $40,000 |
Builds are priced after scoping. A teardown or a written design comes off the price of the build that follows it, and a second opinion comes off a larger engagement the same way. Work spanning many teams and tenants, or a fleet much larger than most, gets a custom scope instead of the prices above.
Builds are fixed-scope implementation, delivered async against a date we agree on.
Every term you would be signing is on the terms page, readable before you send a word.
Where this is not the right fit
- Ongoing headcount
- If you need another engineer on the team indefinitely, that is a hire, not a consulting engagement. Everything I take on has a defined scope, a start, and an end.
- Approved vendor lists
- You contract with an LLC and are invoiced like any other vendor. If procurement requires a name already on an approved list, that is a legitimate requirement and not one I can meet.
- Concept to company
- I build services and tools that plug into systems which already exist and already have users, because that is where the constraints are real. Turning a raw idea into a product with no users yet is a different job.
Who does the work
Douglas Adolph. I designed and built the deployment system behind a fleet of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters at a Fortune 50 company, and took deployments to that fleet from weeks down to seconds, and I still maintain it today. Around it I have written the controllers that keep a fleet honest, the authentication path teams use to reach clusters at all, the secrets tooling, and the post-deploy verification that catches a release which reconciled cleanly and is quietly unhealthy.
The engineer who scopes your work is the engineer who does it.
Longer background, and the public code I own, at douglasadolph.com. Read the source before you talk to me.
Send me the problem
Tell me what you are trying to find out and I will tell you whether I can help, including when the answer is that you do not need me.
- What is stuck, or what you are trying to measure.
- What you have already tried, and what happened.
- Any date you are working against.
A short note beats a long form. What comes back is a reply from me rather than a scheduling link, which engagement fits or that none of them does, and for a build, a scope and a number before you owe anything.