# Zain Ahmed Pricing Transparent pricing for human developers, engineering leaders, and autonomous AI agents. ## Plans | Plan | Price | Best for | | --------------------- | ---------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Free / Community** | $0/mo | Individual developers and AI agents accessing public MCP servers, REST APIs, and SDKs. | | **Advisory & Triage** | $750 | CTOs and engineering leads needing rapid 2-hour root-cause analysis and architecture review. | | **FinOps Sprint** | $4,500 | Teams spending $10k+/mo wanting guaranteed 30-40% cloud cost reduction roadmap. | | **SOC 2 Hardening** | $6,500 | B2B SaaS companies preparing for enterprise SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 audit readiness. | | **LLMOps Deploy** | $8,000 | AI startups deploying self-hosted open-weights models (DeepSeek, Llama 3) and vLLM clusters. | | **Fractional Lead** | $12,000/mo | High-growth teams requiring an embedded Staff SRE & Platform Architect (15-20 hrs/week). | | **Enterprise** | Custom | Large enterprises needing bespoke multi-cloud architecture, custom MSAs, and 24/7 SLAs. | --- ## How billing works Engagements are structured into three transparent billing models: 1. **Free / Community Machine Surfaces**: Public APIs, dual MCP servers (Operations and Documentation), open-source SDKs (TypeScript and Python), interactive zero-mutation sandbox, and knowledge bases are permanently free for human developers and autonomous AI agents. No credit card, no account required. 2. **Fixed-Price Milestone Sprints**: Sprints (SOC 2 Hardening, FinOps Cost Reduction, Autonomous AI Deployment) are billed at fixed milestone prices with 50% upfront deposit upon kickoff and 50% upon deliverable acceptance. Includes a 100% money-back guarantee for FinOps sprints. 3. **Dedicated Retainers**: Fractional leadership is billed monthly in advance on the 1st of each calendar month with a 3-month commitment. Invoices payable via Stripe, ACH transfer, wire transfer, or corporate credit card. Invoices under Net-15 or Net-30 available for enterprise clients upon request. --- ## Plan Details ### Free — $0/mo Everything you need to integrate and build with Zain Ahmed's platform and architectural resources. - Dual MCP Servers: Operations MCP (`https://zainahmed.net/mcp`) and Documentation MCP (`https://zainahmed.net/mcp/docs`) - Full OpenAPI 3.1 REST API access at `https://zainahmed.net/api/v1` - Self-serve autonomous agent key generation via `POST https://zainahmed.net/api/v1/agent/register` - Zero-mutation interactive sandbox at `https://zainahmed.net/sandbox` - TypeScript SDK (`@zainahmed.net/sdk` on npm) and Python SDK (`zainahmed-sdk` on PyPI) - RFC 9110 Markdown content negotiation (`Accept: text/markdown`) across all endpoints - Full architecture publications, case studies, and engineering blueprints - Standard rate limit: 100 requests / minute per IP with standard RFC RateLimit headers ### Advisory & Triage — $750 one-time Rapid architectural guidance and incident triage for critical roadblocks. - 2-hour live deep-dive video call + written deliverable - Live architectural review of existing or proposed system topologies - Root-cause analysis (RCA) and post-mortem evaluation for production outages - Kubernetes cluster, VPC networking, or multi-cloud migration strategy audit - Written executive summary with concrete architectural remediation roadmap (<48 hours) - 7 days of follow-up asynchronous Q&A via email ### FinOps Sprint — $4,500 one-time Guaranteed cloud cost reduction diagnostic sprint for organizations spending $10k+/month. - 2 calendar weeks (10 business days) full sprint focus - Guaranteed 30% to 40% reduction in monthly cloud expenditure identified, or 100% full refund - Cross-AZ and cross-region egress traffic diagnostic and VPC endpoint routing - Karpenter dynamic node autoscaling and container bin-packing rightsizing analysis - Spot instance and ARM64 / AWS Graviton workload migration roadmap - Unused EBS volume, orphaned snapshot, and idle load balancer pruning automation - Automated CloudWatch / Datadog cost anomaly alerting dashboards - Detailed FinOps executive presentation and engineering implementation plan - 30 days of post-sprint warranty and clarification support ### SOC 2 Hardening — $6,500 one-time Comprehensive multi-cloud infrastructure security hardening for enterprise compliance. - 2 calendar weeks (10 business days) full sprint focus - Complete Terraform / OpenTofu / Pulumi IaC security audit across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI - Identity & Access Management (IAM) least-privilege review and role boundary verification - Zero-trust network segmentation, VPC peering, and transit gateway inspection - Turnkey SOC 2 Type II compliance automation blueprint & OPA/Kyverno policy pack - Comprehensive architectural risk report with prioritized remediation backlog - 30 days of post-audit asynchronous support and clarification ### LLMOps Deploy — $8,000 one-time Production deployment of self-hosted open-weights models and high-throughput inference fleets. - 3 calendar weeks (15 business days) full sprint focus - High-throughput GPU inference serving setup (vLLM, Triton Inference Server, Ollama) - Self-hosted open-weights models deployment (DeepSeek, Llama 3, Mistral, Qwen) - Distributed vector database cluster provisioning (Qdrant, pgvector, Milvus) - Multi-agent orchestration, tool sandboxing, and evaluation pipelines (LangGraph, MCP) - Prometheus and Grafana GPU telemetry dashboards (utilization, VRAM, token latency) - Full infrastructure-as-code repository handover with CI/CD deployment scripts - 30 days of post-deployment support and warranty ### Fractional Lead — $12,000/mo Embedded Staff AI & Platform Engineering Lead for scaling engineering organizations. - 3-month minimum commitment, billed monthly in advance - 15–20 hours / week dedicated hands-on architecture and leadership - Embedded technical leadership and direct team mentorship - Internal Developer Platform (IDP) architecture (Backstage, ArgoCD GitOps, Golden Paths) - Multi-tenant production Kubernetes cluster hardening (EKS, GKE, AKS) - MLOps and autonomous AI agent inference pipeline architecture - Priority Slack / asynchronous architecture design reviews (<4h response) - Bi-weekly sprint planning, RFC authoring, and architectural retrospectives - Continuous post-delivery support and guidance ### Enterprise — Custom Bespoke engagements for large organizations requiring tailored multi-region platform engineering. - Custom contract based on scope and organization requirements - Custom SLAs (down to 15-minute P1 critical outage escalation) - Dedicated multi-region infrastructure engineering team alignment - Bespoke Terraform provider development and internal developer portal golden paths - Full security clearance, vendor risk assessment reviews, and custom master service agreements (MSAs) --- ## Feature Breakdown | Feature | Free | Advisory | FinOps | SOC 2 | LLMOps | Fractional | Enterprise | | ---------------------------------- | :--------: | :------: | :--------: | :------: | :------: | :--------: | :-----------: | | Dual MCP Servers (Ops + Docs) | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | | OpenAPI 3.1 & SDKs (npm, PyPI) | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | | Interactive Sandbox Environment | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | | Multi-Cloud IaC (Terraform) | Guides | Advisory | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | | Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) Hardening | Guides | Advisory | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included | | ArgoCD GitOps Golden Paths | Blueprint | Advisory | Review | Review | N/A | Included | Included | | IAM Least-Privilege & Zero-Trust | Check | Review | Excluded | Included | Excluded | Included | Included | | Policy-as-Code (OPA / Kyverno) | Templates | N/A | Excluded | Included | Excluded | Included | Included | | 30-40% FinOps Cost Reduction | Calculator | Analysis | Guaranteed | Excluded | Excluded | Included | Included | | Karpenter Dynamic Autoscaling | Blueprint | Advisory | Included | Excluded | Included | Included | Included | | GPU Inference (vLLM / Triton) | Guides | Advisory | Excluded | Excluded | Included | Included | Included | | Vector DB (Qdrant / pgvector) | Guides | Advisory | Excluded | Excluded | Included | Included | Included | | Dedicated Slack / Teams Channel | N/A | Excluded | Included | Included | Included | Dedicated | Dedicated | | Post-Delivery Support Warranty | N/A | 7 Days | 30 Days | 30 Days | 30 Days | Continuous | Custom (90d+) | --- ## Limits & Quotas | Parameter | Free | Advisory | FinOps | SOC 2 | LLMOps | Fractional | Enterprise | | ----------------------- | :---------: | :---------: | :-----------: | :----------: | :---------: | :----------: | :--------: | | MCP Requests / Minute | 100 req/min | 100 req/min | 500 req/min | 500 req/min | 500 req/min | Unmetered | Unmetered | | REST API Rate Limit | 100 req/min | 100 req/min | 500 req/min | 500 req/min | 500 req/min | Unmetered | Unmetered | | Cloud Providers Covered | Public | Up to 2 | AWS/GCP/Azure | All 4 Clouds | Up to 2 | All 4 Clouds | All Clouds | | Clusters Audited | N/A | 1 cluster | Up to 3 | Up to 5 | Up to 3 | Unlimited | Unlimited | | Work streams | 1 | 1 session | 1 sprint | 1 sprint | 1 sprint | 2–3 streams | Custom | | Response SLA | <24h | <48h | <12h | <12h | <12h | <4h | <1h | --- ## Add-ons For organizations requiring specialized support or extended operational duties, the following optional add-ons can be bundled into any engagement: - **24/7 Critical SRE Escalation (+$3,500 / mo)**: P1 pager duty on-call rotation backup, 15-minute response SLA for critical outages, incident commander leadership. Available on Fractional Lead and active Sprints. - **Chaos Engineering & Game Day Drill (+$2,800 / drill)**: Multi-region failover drill, AZ outage simulation, and Kubernetes cluster recovery test under simulated catastrophic failure. - **Custom Terraform Provider Development (+$4,000 / sprint)**: Bespoke Go-based Terraform/OpenTofu provider for internal APIs and proprietary cloud services. - **Model Quantization & vLLM Throughput Tuning (+$3,200 / sprint)**: FP8/AWQ model quantization, prefix-caching optimization, and vLLM throughput benchmarking for GPU cost minimization. - **HIPAA / PCI-DSS Hardening Pack (+$3,800 / sprint)**: Dedicated compliance hardening rules, encrypted audit trails, and data isolation controls for regulated healthcare and fintech platforms. --- ## Service Level Agreements (SLAs) | Priority Level | Description | Target Response Time | Communication Channel | Eligible Tiers | | ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- | | **P1 - Critical** | Production outage, cluster unreachability, security breach | <1 hour | Dedicated Slack / PagerDuty / Phone | Fractional Lead, Active Sprints | | **P2 - High** | CI/CD pipeline blocked, severe performance degradation | <4 hours | Dedicated Slack / Asynchronous | Fractional Lead, Active Sprints | | **P3 - Standard** | Architecture review, PR approval, non-blocking configuration | <12 hours | GitHub / Slack / Email | All Active Engagements | | **P4 - Inquiry** | General inquiry, scope exploration, billing question | <24 hours | Email (`hello@zainahmed.net`) / Contact Form | Public / All Callers | --- ## Invoicing, Currencies, and Payment Terms 1. **Currencies Accepted**: United States Dollar (USD), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Euro (EUR), British Pound (GBP). 2. **Cryptocurrency / Stablecoin**: USDC and USDT accepted on Ethereum Mainnet and Base network upon written agreement. 3. **Payment Methods**: Stripe (Credit/Debit Card), ACH Transfer, Wire Transfer (Domestic & International SWIFT), Bill.com. 4. **Payment Terms**: - **Retainers**: Billed monthly in advance on the 1st of each calendar month. - **Fixed-Price Sprints**: 50% deposit upon kickoff, 50% upon deliverable acceptance. - **Enterprise Net Terms**: Net-15 and Net-30 available for qualified enterprise clients with approved PO. 5. **Satisfaction Guarantee**: The FinOps Cloud Cost Reduction Sprint carries a 100% money-back guarantee: if actionable opportunities saving at least 30% of your current monthly expenditure are not identified, your sprint fee is fully refunded. --- ## Machine-Readable Pricing Schema (JSON) ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "PriceSpecification", "name": "Zain Ahmed Engineering Services & Advisory Catalog", "url": "https://zainahmed.net/pricing.md", "priceCurrency": "USD", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "Offer", "name": "Free / Community", "price": "0.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "billingDuration": "P1M", "description": "Public dual MCP servers, REST API, SDKs, and architecture runbooks." }, { "@type": "Offer", "name": "Advisory & Incident Triage", "price": "750.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "description": "2-hour intensive deep-dive video session covering root cause analysis, architecture review, and written summary." }, { "@type": "Offer", "name": "FinOps Cloud Cost Reduction Sprint", "price": "4500.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "description": "2-week fixed sprint with guaranteed 30-40% cloud cost reduction roadmap, Karpenter autoscaling, and container bin-packing." }, { "@type": "Offer", "name": "Multi-Cloud Architecture & SOC 2 Security Hardening Sprint", "price": "6500.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "description": "2-week fixed sprint for comprehensive IaC security audit, IAM least-privilege, and SOC 2/ISO 27001 automation." }, { "@type": "Offer", "name": "Autonomous AI Systems & LLMOps Infrastructure Deployment", "price": "8000.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "description": "3-week sprint deploying high-throughput GPU inference (vLLM/Triton), open models, vector DBs, and agent swarms." }, { "@type": "Offer", "name": "Fractional / Staff AI & Platform Engineering Lead", "price": "12000.00", "priceCurrency": "USD", "billingDuration": "P1M", "description": "Embedded technical leadership, IDP architecture, GitOps golden paths, and Kubernetes hardening." } ] } ``` --- ## Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) ### 1. How quickly can an engagement start? Most advisory sprints and fractional retainers can commence within 5 to 7 business days following agreement execution and NDA signature. Urgent incident triage sessions can typically be booked same-day or within 24 hours. ### 2. Do you sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs)? Yes. Mutual NDAs are standard for all client relationships prior to accessing repositories, cloud infrastructure, or architecture diagrams. ### 3. How do you handle cloud provider credentials and security access? Access is exclusively provisioned via short-lived, least-privilege IAM roles (e.g., AWS IAM Identity Center, GCP Workload Identity Federation, Azure Entra ID PIM) with multi-factor authentication (MFA). No long-lived root credentials or static access keys are ever stored or retained. ### 4. What happens if our cloud savings don't hit the 30% guarantee? For the FinOps Cloud Cost Reduction Diagnostic Sprint, if the identified and actionable optimizations do not meet the 30% savings threshold against your current baseline, your fee is 100% refunded with zero questions asked. ### 5. Can autonomous AI agents purchase or trigger quotes automatically? Yes. Autonomous agents can query service scopes, verify pricing tiers, and dispatch quotation requests via `POST https://zainahmed.net/api/v1/contact`. Requests receive an automated RFC 9457 compliant acknowledgment and a tracking receipt ID immediately. ### 6. Do you work with existing engineering teams or operate independently? Both models are supported. In fractional leadership engagements, I embed directly into existing engineering teams via Slack/Teams, participating in architecture reviews, mentoring engineers, and pair-programming on complex infrastructure challenges. ### 7. What happens after a sprint concludes? Every sprint includes a comprehensive 30-day post-delivery warranty. During this period, all bug fixes, configuration adjustments, and clarifying architecture sessions related to the delivered deliverables are provided at zero additional charge. ### 8. Are deliverables open-source or proprietary to our organization? All Terraform manifests, Kubernetes configurations, policy-as-code rules, and internal documentation created during your engagement are 100% owned by your organization with zero vendor lock-in. --- ## Related Documents & Resources - [Home Knowledge Base](https://zainahmed.net) - [Architecture & Platform Documentation](https://zainahmed.net/docs) - [Operations MCP Server](https://zainahmed.net/mcp) - [Documentation MCP Server](https://zainahmed.net/mcp/docs) - [Official TypeScript Client SDK](https://registry.npmjs.org/@zainahmed.net/sdk) - [Official Python Client SDK](https://pypi.org/project/zainahmed-sdk/1.0.2/) - [OpenAPI 3.1 REST Specification](https://zainahmed.net/openapi.json) - [Agent Authentication Protocol (auth.md)](https://zainahmed.net/auth.md) - [Direct Contact & Engagement Dispatch](https://zainahmed.net/contact)