The one nobody else sells
Second Opinion
$2,000 flat · 5 business daysSomebody quoted you. Maybe it’s fair, maybe it isn’t, and you’d have to be a Drupal developer to know which — which is a rough spot to be in, because the whole reason you’re hiring one is that you aren’t.
I’ll read the proposal, the architecture and the number, then write you a page that says whether it’s reasonable, what’s missing, what’s padded, and the three questions to ask them before you sign. You keep the memo whoever you end up hiring.
Sometimes the answer is ‘this is a good quote, sign it.’ That’s happened, and I still sent the invoice. Credits in full toward anything you hire me for in the next thirty days.
I went looking and could not find another shop that sells this one. Plenty will quote you a rebuild; almost nobody will read somebody else’s quote for a flat fee and tell you it’s fine. It costs a shop very little to be the second bidder and a great deal to be the honest one, which is roughly the whole reason this page has prices on it.
Every answer, on one table
Same seven questions asked of all thirteen, so you can compare them the way you’d compare anything else you buy.
| Diagnostic | Price | Best when | What gets opened up | What you get back | Days | Fee credits toward |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site Health Check | $950 flat | You want a straight read before committing to anything | Performance, security posture, SEO fundamentals, accessibility, backup and update hygiene | A prioritized fix list with quick wins separated from structural work, plus a 30-minute walkthrough | 5 business days | Any plan's first month or any deeper diagnostic, 30 days |
| AI License & Spend AuditAI | $950 flat | You bought AI seats in 2024 or 2025 and nobody can say what they did | Every AI subscription and seat you pay for, with real active-use rates out of the admin centres | A cancel, downgrade or reassign list with the annual dollar figure and the renewal date it has to happen by | 5 business days from access | Any AI or data engagement, 120 days |
| Drupal 10 → 11 Readiness | $1,250 flat | You are on Drupal 10 and December 9, 2026 is on your calendar | Every contrib module checked for a D11 release, every deprecation flagged with an effort estimate | A go/no-go and a fixed-price upgrade quote good for 60 days — one costed page for whoever signs the cheque | 5 business days | The upgrade, 60 days |
| Reporting Readiness CheckData | $1,450 flat | Somebody wants dashboards and nobody has read the database yet | The actual schema — Drupal Commerce, WooCommerce, or the ERP feed — and what it can honestly answer today | A go/no-go on Power BI with the alternative named if it is not, and a fixed-price quote good for 60 days | 5 business days | Three Questions or the Reporting Layer, 60 days |
| Second Opinion | $2,000 flat | Somebody quoted you and you have no way to judge it | Another shop's proposal, architecture and number, line by line, priced against the 2026 market | A written memo: what is missing, what is padded, and the three questions to ask before you sign | 5 business days | Any follow-on, 30 days |
| Rescue Assessment | $2,500 flat | Someone else built it and they are gone | Hosting, DNS, the repo if there is one, dependencies, backups, who has access, what is already broken | What you actually have, what is urgent, and what stable costs | 5 business days | The rescue or your first month of Air Time, 30 days |
| Checkout Teardown | $3,000 flat | The store works but the money leaks | Cart, checkout, promotion stack, transactional email — plus a client-side script inventory for PCI DSS 6.4.3 | Findings ranked by how fast you can stop the leak, and a tamper-detection review for 11.6.1 | 10 business days | Fixes booked, 30 days |
| Upgrade Assessment | $3,500 flat | You are on Drupal 7, 8 or 9 and need a real number | Module-by-module review of a legacy estate against Drupal 11 | A costed roadmap with a real migration number and the custom-code risk called honestly | 10 business days | The migration, 60 days |
| AI Integration ReadinessAI | $3,500 flat | You want to build something with AI and nobody has read your systems | Where the truth actually lives, what is queryable today, and who is allowed to see what | A system-of-record map, a written permission model, three scored workflows, and a seed eval set with verified answers | 10 business days from access | Any AI engagement, on the same terms as every other diagnostic |
| Performance Audit | $4,500 flat | It is slow and you have already tried the obvious things | Render pipeline, cache strategy, database, edge config, Core Web Vitals in field and lab | Prioritized written findings with an estimated cost per fix, and an hour walking through them | 10 business days | Remediation, 30 days |
| Tableau → Power BI AssessmentData | $4,500 flat | Somebody upstairs decided you are moving off Tableau | Every workbook parsed and classified against a published rubric, with the dead ones flagged | A per-workbook fixed quote good for 60 days and a sequencing plan | 10 business days | The migration, 60 days |
| AI Test PatternAI | $7,500 flat | Before anybody signs a build, on the theory that measuring beats guessing | One workflow against 200–500 of your real records, with no integration and no production access | A measured accuracy number on your own data, a cost per run, and a recommendation that may be “do not build this” | 10 business days | Any build, in full |
| Build Roadmap | $3,500 – $7,500 | The thing does not exist yet and you need to know what to build | Platform selection with the reasoning shown, architecture, and a costed phased plan | A roadmap that is yours to take to any builder, including not me | 2–3 weeks | The build, 60 days |
Not sure which one? Buy the cheapest.
The $950 Site Health Check is a straight read of the gauges, and one of the things it reads is which of the deeper answers below is worth your money — or that none of them are. That’s a real outcome and it happens; a lot of sites are fine and just needed somebody to say so.
Then the $950 comes off whichever one you pick, within thirty days. That’s the whole point of the first rung: you’re not paying twice to find the trailhead.
There’s a tie at the bottom of the ladder now. The AI License & Spend Audit is the same $950, and if what’s bothering you is seats and renewals rather than the site itself, buy that one instead. Same rule, same thirty days.
What each one actually is
Site Health Check
$950 flat
5 business days
A straight read of the gauges before you commit to anything. You get a prioritized fix list with the quick wins separated from the structural work, and a half-hour on a call going through it. It used to be $495; at that price it sat in a pile with automated scans, and the honest difference is that a person read your site and decided what mattered. If you want the automated version, PageSpeed Insights is free and genuinely good — start there. This is the one where somebody tells you which of those findings you can safely ignore.
- What gets opened up
- Performance, security posture, SEO fundamentals, accessibility, backup and update hygiene
- What you get back
- A prioritized fix list with quick wins separated from structural work, plus a 30-minute walkthrough
- Fee credits toward
- Any plan's first month or any deeper diagnostic, 30 days
Book it sixty to ninety days before your Copilot renewal, because that is the only window where the answer is actionable — annual terms under the New Commerce Experience allow no mid-term seat reductions. I read the admin centres, count who has a seat and has not opened it, check whether you are separately buying a Power BI Pro licence your E5 already includes, look at the two Fabric tenant flags almost nobody has seen, and write one page your CFO can act on. Your Microsoft partner will run a Copilot assessment for free and you should take it — it is a good adoption assessment. But they earn margin on every seat you keep, so it will never end with “cancel fourteen of these.” I resell nothing and make nothing on your licences, which is the only reason that sentence is available to me. Scope is six vendors or seat pools and one tenant; past that it is hourly.
- What gets opened up
- Every AI subscription and seat you pay for, with real active-use rates out of the admin centres
- What you get back
- A cancel, downgrade or reassign list with the annual dollar figure and the renewal date it has to happen by
- Fee credits toward
- Any AI or data engagement, 120 days
Drupal 10 → 11 Readiness
$1,250 flat
5 business days
Drupal 10 stops getting security fixes on December 9, 2026. This tells you what that means for your site specifically: what is already D11-ready, what needs a patch, what needs replacing, what the whole thing costs, and how long it takes. Upgrade Status and Rector are free and you should absolutely run them — go do that first. What they cannot tell you is what the blockers cost and which modules are never getting a D11 release.
And a real limit: I can take four of these through to a finished upgrade before December 9, 2026. After that the honest advice is a paid extended-support subscription and a calmer schedule in the spring, not a rush job in the last week.
- What gets opened up
- Every contrib module checked for a D11 release, every deprecation flagged with an effort estimate
- What you get back
- A go/no-go and a fixed-price upgrade quote good for 60 days — one costed page for whoever signs the cheque
- Fee credits toward
- The upgrade, 60 days
BI quotes in this market vary tenfold for the same stated scope and nobody says why out loud. The reason is almost never dashboard complexity — it is that WooCommerce keeps order data in wp_postmeta or HPOS depending on your version and how far a migration got, and Drupal Commerce spreads one order across order, order_item, profile and price-field tables with revisions on top. Anybody quoting you a dashboard before reading that is guessing, and you have no way to tell. This is the read. It also does the licence arithmetic on your real headcount rather than a generic table, and it will tell you if the answer is a SQL view and no new tool at all.
- What gets opened up
- The actual schema — Drupal Commerce, WooCommerce, or the ERP feed — and what it can honestly answer today
- What you get back
- A go/no-go on Power BI with the alternative named if it is not, and a fixed-price quote good for 60 days
- Fee credits toward
- Three Questions or the Reporting Layer, 60 days
Second Opinion
$2,000 flat
5 business days
Somebody quoted you. Maybe it is fair, maybe it isn't, and you would have to be a Drupal developer to know which — which is a rough spot, because the whole reason you are hiring one is that you aren't. I will read the proposal, the architecture and the number, then write you a page that says whether it is reasonable, what is missing, what is padded, and the three questions to ask them before you sign. You keep the memo whoever you end up hiring. Sometimes the answer is 'this is a good quote, sign it.' That has happened, and I still sent the invoice.
- What gets opened up
- Another shop's proposal, architecture and number, line by line, priced against the 2026 market
- What you get back
- A written memo: what is missing, what is padded, and the three questions to ask before you sign
- Fee credits toward
- Any follow-on, 30 days
Rescue Assessment
$2,500 flat
5 business days
The builder is gone, or the login does not work, or nobody left knows what is in there. I will go find out — whoever built it, however long ago, whatever they were thinking. It is $3,500 if you are on Drupal 7, running multisite, or carrying more custom code than one person writes in a year. And you will know which one you are before you pay, not after: send a read-only login or just the module directory listing and a fifteen-minute automated scan settles it. Publishing the price is easy. Publishing how the price gets decided is the part that actually helps you.
- One site · $2,500
- Drupal 7, multisite, or heavy custom code · $3,500
- Which rung you are on · a free fifteen-minute scan, before you pay
- What gets opened up
- Hosting, DNS, the repo if there is one, dependencies, backups, who has access, what is already broken
- What you get back
- What you actually have, what is urgent, and what stable costs
- Fee credits toward
- The rescue or your first month of Air Time, 30 days
Checkout Teardown
$3,000 flat
10 business days
Your cart, checkout, promotion stack and transactional email, torn down finding by finding, ranked by how fast you can stop the leak. Since March 2025 it also produces the two artifacts your QSA asks for: a current inventory of every client-side script on your payment pages (PCI DSS 6.4.3) and a tamper-detection review (11.6.1). Scoped to the checkout flow itself — the full customer-journey review is priced separately.
- What gets opened up
- Cart, checkout, promotion stack, transactional email — plus a client-side script inventory for PCI DSS 6.4.3
- What you get back
- Findings ranked by how fast you can stop the leak, and a tamper-detection review for 11.6.1
- Fee credits toward
- Fixes booked, 30 days
Upgrade Assessment
$3,500 flat
10 business days
An aging Drupal site — 7, 8 or 9 — assessed module by module, with a costed roadmap to Drupal 11 and honest risk calls. An estate of up to five sites is $7,500, plus $1,200 for each site after that, and comes with a sequencing plan you can hand a budget owner.
- One site · $3,500
- An estate, up to five sites · $7,500
- Each site past five · $1,200
- What gets opened up
- Module-by-module review of a legacy estate against Drupal 11
- What you get back
- A costed roadmap with a real migration number and the custom-code risk called honestly
- Fee credits toward
- The migration, 60 days
Several good Drupal shops will run an AI readiness audit for free. Take one — they are useful, and a free audit costs you nothing but an hour. What comes back is a maturity scorecard and a list of opportunities. What does not come back is the two answers that actually set the price of the build: which system holds the truth when your ERP and your storefront disagree about inventory, and whether per-user permissions have to survive into retrieval. That second one is the difference between a $25,000 build and an $80,000 one in every published price list I can find. Finding those answers means reading your systems, not running a workshop. That is what this buys, and it comes off the build price if you go ahead. Ten business days from the day I have access — I run one at a time, so the start date is the one I confirm, not the day you pay.
- What gets opened up
- Where the truth actually lives, what is queryable today, and who is allowed to see what
- What you get back
- A system-of-record map, a written permission model, three scored workflows, and a seed eval set with verified answers
- Fee credits toward
- Any AI engagement, on the same terms as every other diagnostic
Performance Audit
$4,500 flat
10 business days
Up to six templates and three key journeys, any stack. About twenty hours of my time, fixed fee — you pay the fee, not the clock. Which works out to less than my hourly rate, and that is deliberate: a fixed scope is less risky for me than open-ended work, so it costs you less. If it takes me longer than I thought, that is my problem and not your invoice.
- What gets opened up
- Render pipeline, cache strategy, database, edge config, Core Web Vitals in field and lab
- What you get back
- Prioritized written findings with an estimated cost per fix, and an hour walking through them
- Fee credits toward
- Remediation, 30 days
Migration quotes in this market run $25,000 to $110,000 over ten to fourteen weeks, and the spread is entirely workbook count and workbook complexity — which is countable, which means it is quotable. Every workbook gets inventoried and sorted simple, moderate or complex against a rubric you can read: how many sources, how many custom calculations, whether there are LOD expressions, parameter actions, dashboard actions. The unused and duplicated ones get flagged for retirement rather than migration, which is usually the cheapest finding in the report. What I will not do yet is publish a per-workbook rate card, because I have not migrated a workbook. When I have, that number goes on the page.
- What gets opened up
- Every workbook parsed and classified against a published rubric, with the dead ones flagged
- What you get back
- A per-workbook fixed quote good for 60 days and a sequencing plan
- Fee credits toward
- The migration, 60 days
Eighty-eight percent of agent pilots never reach production, and the three named causes are unclear success criteria, not enough access to tools and data, and evaluation coverage that drifted — none of which you can know from a discovery call. So this is the rung where we find out. Your records, no integration, no touching production. You get an accuracy number, a cost per run at that day’s token prices, and the deterministic rules version scored against the same set so you can see whether a model was ever needed. Thirty hours at my published rate, fixed, so you know the number before you start. The inference runs on my account and I eat it, capped at $400 — and if a test would blow past that, I will tell you before I run it, not after.
- What gets opened up
- One workflow against 200–500 of your real records, with no integration and no production access
- What you get back
- A measured accuracy number on your own data, a cost per run, and a recommendation that may be “do not build this”
- Fee credits toward
- Any build, in full
Build Roadmap
$3,500 – $7,500
2–3 weeks
Paid discovery for the thing that does not exist yet. A roadmap runs about 8% of the build it scopes, which is where the range comes from — and the fee credits in full toward the build when it starts within 60 days.
- What gets opened up
- Platform selection with the reasoning shown, architecture, and a costed phased plan
- What you get back
- A roadmap that is yours to take to any builder, including not me
- Fee credits toward
- The build, 60 days
Two of these have a second rung, and the formula is printed above rather than discovered on an invoice. If you’re somewhere between rungs, the rescue practice and the upgrade practice each have their own page with the longer version.
How the credit works
Written down once, in the same words I’ll use on the phone.
Thirty days
Book the work within thirty days of the delivered findings and the whole fee comes off the first invoice, as its own labeled line. Not a coupon, not a percentage — the money you already paid.
Sixty on the roadmaps
The two upgrade rungs and the Build Roadmap credit for sixty days instead, because a migration or a build has to clear a budget cycle before anybody can sign, and thirty days is not a budget cycle anywhere I have ever worked.
One per client
One diagnostic fee credits, not a stack of them. Buy a second answer because you genuinely need it, not because you’re trying to build a discount out of invoices.
Never doubled up
Founding Five or a diagnostic credit, whichever saves you more. Not both. If the arithmetic is close I’ll run it for you and apply the better one, which is the only version of that conversation worth having.
What a diagnostic is not
It is not the repair. A diagnostic is somebody senior reading your site and writing down what he found, ranked, with a number next to each line. Nothing gets fixed while it happens, and I’d rather say that here than have you find out in week two.
Fixes are quoted separately — $250 an hour, with a written estimate before anything longer than an hour — or folded into an Air Time plan, where the hours are already reserved and a small one needs no quote at all. Either way you see the number before the work starts. There has never been a surprise invoice here and there isn’t going to be one.
Also worth saying
- It is not an emergency service. If the site is down right now, that’s the rescue door, not this one.
- It is not a sales call with a PDF at the end. The findings are yours to hand to any builder, including not me — that’s the point of paying for them.
- It is not remediation smuggled in under a scope. If a five-minute fix turns up while I’m in there, I’ll just do it and say so.
- And it is not always necessary. Free tools cover a real share of this. When they cover yours, that’s the answer you’ll get, for free, in an email.
Not sure which row is yours? Write me three sentences about what’s actually happening and I’ll tell you which one to buy, or that you don’t need any of them. That part’s free and it’s staying free.