Cloud Migration Service
The shortcut: Most consultants quote a fixed-price "lift to AWS" before they've seen the server inventory and end up eating the surprise. Sell a paid 2-week discovery first, then quote the migration. The discovery itself is your first $4K-$8K invoice and the only way you stop losing money on under-scoped projects.
Industry: Software & Tech | Investment level: Medium — $5,000-$25,000 | Time to launch: 8-12 weeks (one cloud certification + a paid discovery template + first signed pilot gate the launch)
Best for: A sysadmin, devops engineer, or solutions architect who has actually moved production workloads — not just read about it. You can read a network diagram, talk to a CFO about TCO, and tell a client "no, we are not refactoring that PHP monolith this year." What you'll likely make: $4,000-$8,000 month 3, $10,000-$18,000 month 6, $18,000-$30,000 month 12. Math is in Section 4.
Market Opportunity
Your client has servers in a colo and a $14K/month bill. They have a half-finished AWS account someone's intern set up two years ago. They have a CFO who read an article about cloud savings. What they don't have is a written plan that says which workloads move, which stay, and what it costs in year one versus year three.
That gap is the entire business. The 10-100 person company is too small for Accenture and too complex for a generalist MSP. They want one technical person who will own the answer.
Most cloud migrations don't fail on the technical lift. They fail because nobody mapped which apps needed to move — and the client ends up paying for cloud AND keeping the old servers running for 18 months. You sell the map first.
Why this is a good time to start: Two-year cloud contracts signed in 2022-2023 by SMBs are coming up for renewal in 2026, and the bills are bigger than anyone budgeted. The companies hiring you now are the ones whose CFO finally asked "why is AWS our third-largest line item?"
Start with this idea — free signup, no card required.
