An AWS readiness review: will your setup survive your next 10x?
Five working days, one fixed price. An AWS production readiness review for startups: we read your accounts, your Terraform (or the lack of it), your pipelines and your bill, then hand you a ranked list of fixes with a cost and an effort next to each one.
Fixed fee, read-only access, and the report is yours whatever you decide next.
Seven areas, checked against your real account.
- Accounts, Organizations and root access01
- People, IAM and keys that should be gone02
- Networking, public exposure, NAT and IPs03
- Data: backups, retention, a restore that works04
- Deploys, rollback and who can ship to prod05
- Monitoring, alerts and what wakes someone up06
- Cost: the top line items and the waste in them07
We look at what's actually deployed, not a questionnaire about it. If you use Terraform we read it; if things were clicked together in the console we map what exists so it can be brought under code later.
Two numbers come with the report that founders tend to like: what your bill would be today without credits, and what the riskiest finding would cost you if it went wrong during Series A diligence.
Five working days, start to finish.
- Access and a 30-minute kick-off.
You run a short Terraform or CloudFormation snippet that creates a read-only role. You add us to the repos. We ask what keeps you up at night.
- We read everything.
Accounts, IAM, VPCs, databases, pipelines, alarms and twelve months of billing data. Anything urgent gets a message the same day, not a footnote on day five.
- A 20-minute check-in.
To confirm we've understood how the system is meant to work.
- The report and a 60-minute walkthrough.
Usually 10 to 15 pages. Findings ranked by risk and cost, each with the fix and roughly how long it takes. Then you remove our access.
Three times this review pays for itself.
Before or just after launch. It's cheaper to fix access and backups with 50 customers than with 5,000.
Before a raise. Technical due diligence asks about security, disaster recovery and cloud cost per customer. Our Series A prep guide covers the questions; the review gives you the answers and a plan for the gaps.
After an incident. Something fell over and everyone wants to know what else might. A calm outside read is often what the team needs.
How this differs from an AWS Well-Architected Review.
The Well-Architected Framework is a good set of questions written for every AWS customer, from a two-person startup to a bank. Running it properly takes days of workshops and produces a lot of "medium risk" items that a seed-stage company can safely ignore for a year.
We use it as a reference, then throw out what doesn't matter at your size and put a price and a deadline on what does. You'll see "fix before Series A" and "fine until 50 engineers" in the report, because that's the decision you're actually making.
What access do you need, exactly?
A role with AWS's ReadOnlyAccess and billing read permissions, read access to your repositories and CI, and viewer access to your monitoring if you have it. No passwords, no root, and nothing that can change your systems.
What if we're a two-person team with one server?
Then the review is probably overkill. Send us a description of the setup and we'll tell you honestly whether a 30-minute call would cover it.
Does the fee count towards anything?
Yes. If you start a monthly plan within 30 days, the full $1,900 comes off the first month.
Can our own engineers fix everything in the report?
That's the idea. Each finding says what to change and how, specifically enough that a mid-level engineer can do it. Plenty of teams never hire us after the review, and that's fine.