Your number
$1,400
Your rate card
- Day rate$1,450 per day
- Hourlyfor anything that does not fit a day$175 per hour
- An infrastructure project$11,500 per project
- Monthly retainermonitoring and on-call$9,500 per month
What to charge for each thing (4)
- CI/CD setup$5,000 each
- Cloud migration$17,500 each
- Monitoring and on-call$4,000 per month
- Cost review$2,000 each
US rates for devops / cloud engineers at your level, adjusted for your market. What you last got wins.
For 8 hours at $175, the quote is $1,400.
To take home $85,000 after $9,000 of costs and 30% tax you need to bill $134,286 a year. At 24 billable hours a week for 47 weeks that is $125 an hour, $950 a day. Anything under that is a pay cut you did not agree to.
DevOpss at your level day at about $1,450 ($900 to $2,000 in New York and LA). Your income math lands under that, so the market number is the one to quote; the gap is a raise you are owed.
An infrastructure project runs $3,000 to $20,000 and takes about 40 hours of your time; at your hourly that is $7,000. The number is the higher of the two, because the client is buying the outcome, not the hours.
A retainer is the month, not the hours: monitoring and on-call. It is priced about 20% under the same work bought one at a time, in exchange for the certainty; three months minimum, or it is not a retainer.