Terms of engagement
Every commercial term of the paid practice, in full — how an engagement starts, what it costs, what sits outside the monthly fee, what it costs us when we miss, and what stays yours after. The pricing page carries the summary; this page is the record. Every clause heading is a link, so you can point procurement at the exact line in question.
Scope, up front. These are the commercial terms retainers and fixed-fee work are sold under, published before anyone asks. The website itself is covered separately by the terms of use. A signed engagement agreement restates these terms and takes precedence over this page.
How an engagement starts, what the first ninety days look like, and how you leave. Nothing here locks you in, because a practice with no track record hasn't earned the right to.
- Initial term
- 3 months, then month-to-month on 30 days' notice, either direction. No auto-renewal, no cancellation fee, no remaining-term acceleration. A practice with no track record does not get to demand a lock-in from the party carrying the balance sheet.
- Onboarding
- ENCLAVE $12,500 · STRONGHOLD $18,000. Half on signature, half across months 2–3. A completed RECON credits $6,500 against it. Real onboarding is roughly 90 hours, so it is priced at what it costs instead of what is comfortable.
- Onboarding cadence
- One per quarter, 90 days between start dates. A signed RECON reserves a dated slot. That caps growth at four new clients a year, and that is the honest constraint rather than a marketing one.
- First deliverable
- Baseline snapshot on day 15, first full monthly artifact on day 45. Month one is onboarding and is not sold as a delivery month.
What you pay, how you pay it, and the only circumstances under which the number moves. Every rate on this page is stamped and changelogged.
- Prepay
- Quarterly −5%. Annual is ten months for twelve, and locks the rate for the prepaid period. That rate lock is the real reason to take it.
- Payment
- ACH free. Card +3%. Net-15 at +3%. Net-30 and beyond declined — we're small enough that we can't bank a receivable, and pretending otherwise is how small shops die.
- Price changes
- Stamped Pricing v2026.08 with a public changelog. Your rate is locked for the initial term and any prepaid period. At renewal, then-current list, capped +10% per 12 months for continuously active clients, 60 days' notice.
Work that sits outside the monthly fee, priced in the open. Nothing here is ever auto-billed — it takes your written approval first, every time.
- Out of scope
- Overage $295/hr with written approval, 30-minute increments. Non-client consulting $325/hr, 4-hour minimum. Prepaid 10-hour block $2,950. Nothing is ever auto-billed and hours do not roll over.
- Incident response
- $395/hr with a $3,900 activation. We don't bundle it into any tier, because that would be selling you a promise we can't keep. Your agreement names your own off-hours escalation path for the hours we aren't awake.
What it costs us when we miss, and the hard cap that stops us overselling the hours we have. A response window with no remedy attached is just a marketing number.
- Missed response window
- 5% of the monthly fee per missed acknowledgment, 2% per missed monthly artifact, capped at 25% in a month. Measured from the shared ticket log, which you can audit. A response window with no remedy is a marketing number.
- Client cap
- We carry two retainers with a response window, and three client relationships in total. Not scarcity theatre — it's our hour budget with the overhead counted honestly.
What is yours during the engagement and what stays yours after it. Leaving is supposed to be easy — that is the entire point of owning your own stack.
- White label
- We write findings and documentation so you can hand them to your client unedited, under your own name. Crediting us is optional and never required. What isn't negotiable is that nothing about your clients gets published without written consent.
- If we stop
- You keep every config, runbook, and document in your own repo under a perpetual license for what was deployed. No exit fee, no data hostage, no proprietary agent to rip out. Leaving is supposed to be easy — that is the whole point of owning your stack.
Stamped Pricing v2026.08 · 13 clauses · rate locks per the price changes clause
If a clause here raises a question, that's a good sign — they're written to be asked about before anything is signed.