What data engineering actually costs, and how I price it

People want a rate card. I understand why — it feels like the honest, comparable thing. But a day rate is the wrong way to think about data-engineering work, for you and for me. Here's how I actually price, and how to reason about what this kind of work is worth.

Why I don't lead with a day rate

You are not buying hours. You are buying an outcome — a platform that works, a bill that drops, a pipeline you can trust — without the overhead of hiring for it. A day rate anchors the conversation on the wrong number and creates a genuinely misaligned incentive: the faster and more experienced I am, the less an hourly model "earns," which rewards padding and punishes efficiency. Neither of us wants that. The right anchor isn't my hourly cost; it's the value of the thing built and the alternative you're avoiding.

The one price I do publish: the audit

There's exactly one number on my site, and it's the Data Platform Audit: $3,000, about a week, fixed. I can publish that because it's a defined deliverable — a review of your pipelines, warehouse and costs, and a written roadmap with ranked fixes and effort-and-cost estimates, plus a cost model or small proof-of-concept on your own stack. You keep it whether or not we work together, and the fee comes off a follow-on build. Everything else is scoped, because everything else genuinely varies (I wrote about why build costs range so much).

How I price the actual work

Builds are scoped per project and priced against your real alternatives, not a day rate:

• The fully-loaded cost of the senior data engineer you'd otherwise hire — often $175k–$250k a year, plus months of recruiting (see consultant vs. full-time hire).
• The cloud-warehouse or SaaS-stack bill a leaner build would cut — a number you can estimate for yourself.

A build is quoted as a fixed or milestone-based project, so you know the number up front and I'm rewarded for delivering, not for dragging it out.

Ongoing work — running and extending the platform after it's built — is priced as a fractional engagement: a set slice of time each month, against a fraction of a full-time hire's cost.

How to think about what it's worth to you

Instead of "what's the rate," ask two questions:

1. What would the alternative cost? A full-time senior hire, fully loaded, for a year — or a managed SaaS stack whose bill grows with your usage. That's your real comparison.
2. What does getting it right — or wrong — cost the business? A platform that's late, brittle, or wrong isn't just an infrastructure line item; it's decisions made on bad data. The value of doing it well is usually a multiple of the build price.

Price the work against those, and it stops looking like an hourly expense and starts looking like what it is: buying an outcome at a fraction of the cost of the team you'd assemble to get it.

Why fixed scope beats hourly for both sides

Fixed-scope pricing gives you a number you can budget and approve, and it aligns incentives — I'm paid for the result, so I'm motivated to be efficient, not billable. It requires doing the scoping properly first, which is exactly what the audit is for. That's the honest sequence: a free scoping call to see if I can help, a fixed-price audit to produce a real plan and a real number, then a scoped build. No rate card, because the rate card would tell you less than any of those steps.

If you want your number — not a range, yours — the scoping call below is free and there's no pitch.