The article
You asked three providers what it would cost to manage your cloud and got three answers that do not compare: one per user, one as a share of your cloud bill, one as a monthly fee for a list of work. Cloud managed services pricing is hard to compare because providers count different things. Below is how we price it, why we do not publish a number, and a table for checking any two quotes side by side.
I have been building software for 18 years, and I publish starting prices wherever the smallest version of a job can be defined: a website from $499, an app from $5,000, a developer from $35 an hour. A cloud has no smallest version. Two companies with the same number of servers can need very different care, so we look before we quote. That holds for all our cloud services, not only managed cloud.
In October 2026 I read five pricing guides Google showed for this search. Three of them price managed IT per user or per device, the way an office help desk is priced, and use the word "cloud" between one and four times. None lists its own price for running a cloud; one explains the fee taken as a share of your cloud bill and names its catch: when the provider cuts your bill, its own fee shrinks. Five guides are a small sample, but they show why quotes for the same cloud rarely line up.
Cloud managed services pricing: the short version
| What you pay for | Paid to | How the price is set |
|---|---|---|
| The cloud itself: servers, storage, traffic | AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, in your own account | By what you use; we review the bill with you |
| Running it: updates, monitoring, backups, security, support and cost reviews | Us | A monthly fee for an agreed list of work, set in the estimate |
| An engineer in your team | Us | By the hour, from $35 an hour depending on the role |
| A migration or a rebuild | Us | A price fixed in the contract before work starts |
| The first call and a rough estimate | Nobody | Free |
Why there is no price list for managed cloud
A price list needs a smallest version, and a cloud does not have one. A company with many servers that rarely change can need less care than one with a few servers that ship every day and must never stop. So a review of your setup comes first, then a monthly price for the work.
The review is how we see what runs where. Our plan then names what we take over, what to fix first and what running it will cost, and you have it before any contract. Five pricing guides cannot tell you what your cloud will cost to run; a look at the cloud can.
What a managed cloud price depends on
Five things decide most of the price:
- How many accounts, servers, containers and databases you run. Each needs updates, backups, access rules and a place in the monitoring. Containers and serverless functions count too, even though nobody calls them servers.
- How much has to stay up, and at what hours. A system that may pause for maintenance at night costs less to run than one that must never stop, where every update has to go in without a pause.
- How often the software changes and ships. Frequent releases mean more changes to review, release pipelines to keep working and more moments when something can break.
- Rules you must follow, such as HIPAA, GDPR or PCI DSS. Rules add checks, records and limits on who may touch what. Ask your compliance advisor which of them apply to you and what they require. We are not auditors and certify nothing; that belongs to your counsel and, where a formal assessment exists, an accredited auditor or assessor. We set up the technical side and keep the records.
- The state of the setup we take over. A tidy, documented setup is cheaper to take over than one nobody has looked at for a year. The plan names what to fix first separately from what running it will cost, so you see both.
Two bills: your cloud and our work
Your cloud bill and our fee are separate. You pay AWS, Azure or Google Cloud directly, in your own account, and the data stays yours. Our fee covers the work: updates, monitoring, backups, security, support and cost reviews.
The split protects you three ways. You see the cloud bill exactly as the provider sends it, with nothing resold inside it. Leaving us does not mean moving your billing. And because our monthly plan is a fixed fee for an agreed list of work, not a share of your bill, we have no reason to keep anything running that you do not need: when we switch off something idle, your bill drops and our fee stays the same.
We review the cloud bill with you and cut what you do not need; on managed AWS, for example, we show what each change would save before we make it. Sometimes the biggest saving sits in the design. For AAE Plugin, generative AI inside Adobe After Effects, GPUs were the expensive part, so we built asynchronous GPU workers, and the backend stopped paying for idle hardware.
Three ways to pay for managed cloud
| Way to pay | What you get | Fits when |
|---|---|---|
| A monthly plan | A fixed fee for an agreed list of work, reviewed as your setup grows | Your system runs, and you want its upkeep off your plate |
| By the hour | DevOps engineers who join your team for as long as you need them, through staff augmentation, from $35 an hour depending on the role | You have a team and a process and need hands in it |
| A project | A migration or a rebuild at a price fixed in the contract before work starts | One clear job with an end: a move, a cleanup, a rebuild |
The three combine. A cloud migration can run as a project, and the moved system can then go on a monthly plan.
Managed cloud or a DevOps hire: what to compare
If you are weighing a managed plan against hiring an engineer, compare the whole cost on both sides. A hire costs a salary and everything that comes with it, the time it takes to find the right person, and cover for vacations, sick days and the day that person leaves. A managed plan costs a monthly fee for a list of work, with named engineers who know the setup, a second engineer reviewing every change and developers in the same company when the fault is in the code.
A hire makes sense when the cloud keeps a full-time engineer busy and you want that person inside your team. If that person should come from us, it is the hourly option above: an engineer in your team, in your process.
Pricing models you will meet elsewhere
These are the models you are likely to see in other quotes. None is dishonest by itself, but each fee grows with something, and you want it to grow with the work your cloud really needs.
| Model | Counted by | The fee grows when | What to ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per user | Your employees | You hire | Does our cloud's work grow with our headcount? |
| Per device or server | Machines under management | You add machines | Do containers and serverless functions count? |
| Share of the cloud bill | A percentage of what you pay the provider | Your cloud bill grows | What happens to the fee when the bill goes down? |
| Tiers | Packages with set lists | You move up a tier | What moves us to the next tier? |
| Fixed fee for a list of work | The work named in the contract | The list of work grows | What is outside the list, and how is it priced? |
| Hourly | Hours worked | More hours are worked | Who approves the hours, and how are they reported? |
Picture a cost review that cuts your cloud bill. Under a share-of-the-bill fee, the provider now earns less for the work that saved you money. Under a fixed fee for a list of work, the provider's income stays the same and the saving is all yours. Under a per-user fee, ten new hires raise the fee although the cloud did not change at all.
How to compare two managed cloud quotes
Put both quotes next to this table and forward it to whoever signs. A line that is missing is a question to ask before you sign.
| Line | What it should say | If it is missing, ask |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | The accounts, servers, databases and services covered, by name | Which of our resources are outside? |
| The monthly fee | What it covers: updates, monitoring, backups, security, support, cost reviews | What is not in the fee? |
| Work outside the list | How it is priced, and who approves it before it starts | Who says yes to extra hours? |
| The cloud bill | Paid by you, to the provider, in your own account | Will any of our systems run in an account you own? |
| The takeover | The audit and the first fixes, named apart from the running | Is the first month priced differently? |
| Urgent problems | What counts as urgent, and how fast a person answers | Who answers at night or on a weekend? |
| Backups | How often, where they are kept, when a restore was last tested | When was the last test restore? |
| Access | A role in your account and a personal login for each engineer | How do we remove your access? |
| Changes to the fee | When the fee is reviewed and what makes it change | What would raise it next year? |
| Leaving | The notice period and what you receive on the last day | What do we get when we leave? |
Where cloud bills grow, and what lowers them
A cloud bill tends to grow in the same few places without anyone deciding it. The table names each place and what lowers it:
| Where the bill grows | What lowers it |
|---|---|
| Test servers left running at night, at weekends or after the project | Switching them off, or running them on a schedule |
| Snapshots and backups with no expiry date | A rule for how long each kind of copy is kept |
| Logs kept at full detail for years | Detail kept for a short time; longer only what your rules require |
| Traffic out of the cloud, which grows with your users | Caching, and a content delivery network in front of files and pages |
| Servers sized for a peak that never came | Sizes fitted to the measured load |
| Steady loads at full on-demand prices | Reserved capacity where the load is steady |
| Slow code answered with bigger servers | Fixing the query or the job that is slow |
Two more moves lower the cost of running the cloud, not only the bill. A setup described as code is cheaper to change and to hand over; that is cloud infrastructure management. And one cloud is cheaper to look after than two, unless the second pays for itself.
When a monthly plan is not worth it
- A simple site needs hosting, not a managed cloud. For the sites we build, it comes with support at $29 a month, billed annually: see website maintenance.
- A small cloud that rarely changes may cost less with an engineer's hours when something comes up, which is the hourly option.
- A system you are about to move or retire needs a project for the move, not a year of paying to run what is leaving.
Our other prices
Where a smallest version exists, its price is published: a website from $499, apps from $5,000 and developers from $35 an hour, all on our pricing page. Cloud, IT support and custom software get an individual estimate, free and before any contract.
Get a price for your cloud
Tell us what runs where. A quote needs five things from you:
- the clouds and accounts you have;
- the main systems, and which of them must never stop;
- how often you release new versions;
- the rules your data falls under, if any;
- last month's cloud bill.
We review the setup, then quote a monthly price for the work. The first call and a rough estimate are free, and a new request gets an answer within 30 minutes on weekdays, 9:00-18:00 Miami time. What the work itself includes is on cloud management services; questions and incidents go to cloud support.
