Month-to-month buckets of hours that roll over

How the bucket model works

• Buckets of hours. You choose how many buckets you want each month. Hours are fungible across strategy, implementation, and support.
• Rollover. Unused hours roll into the next month, so a slow month isn’t wasted budget.
• Month-to-month. No long contract. Add buckets in the months you need more and scale back when you don’t.
• No setup fee. There’s no onboarding charge to get started.
• Platform subscription. We deliver through the Nullstone dev platform, which is a separate per-developer subscription.

What it costs

Pricing is quote-on-request. We share specifics on a short discovery call rather than publishing a one-size-fits-all number, because the right starting point depends on your stack and what you need done first.

As a reference point, a fully loaded senior DevOps hire runs roughly $200K–$300K in the first year once you include recruiting and ramp. Fractional typically costs a fraction of that, and you get the expertise from day one instead of after a months-long search.

What’s included

The hours cover whatever moves the needle that month: infrastructure and migrations, CI/CD pipelines, reliability and observability, security and SOC2 controls, and cost and performance work. Everything is built on your own AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts, and you keep full ownership of it.

Who it fits

Engineering teams of roughly 5 to 40 developers. Above about 40 engineers, most teams are ready for a dedicated platform hire; when that happens we hand off cleanly and keep providing the underlying platform on a subscription.

Weighing this against a full-time hire? See fractional DevOps vs. hiring a DevOps engineer.