$59,988/yr. Replaces a $400K platform hire.
A senior platform engineer in NYC costs $250-400K/yr fully loaded. Audit Retainer delivers continuous architecture review + engineering follow-through for the price of a single month of that headcount — and guarantees $50K of recovered waste in the first audit, or the month is free.
Headcount math vs Audit Retainer math.
Same delivery scope. Different cost shape. Different risk profile.
| Line item | Platform hire (mid-market, NYC) | Audit Pro retainer |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | $220,000 | — |
| Benefits + payroll tax (~25%) | $55,000 | — |
| Equity (4-yr vest, $250K grant amortized) | $62,500 | — |
| Recruiter fee (one-time, ~25% base, amortized over 2yr tenure) | $27,500 | — |
| Equipment + software + onboarding | $15,000 | — |
| Management overhead (~10% of an EM's time) | $20,000 | — |
| Retainer (12 months) | — | $59,988 |
| Year-1 fully-loaded cost | ≈ $400,000 | $59,988 |
Year-one delta
$340,012 saved
Even if Audit Retainer found zero additional cloud / vendor waste in year one — which it won't — the headcount-replacement math alone justifies the spend at every tier. The $50K month-one guarantee is the operator-side risk-share on top.
* Loaded cost benchmarks from Levels.fyi + Pave + Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 senior IC bands for NYC. Adjust ±25% for your geo + comp band — the conclusion holds across the range.
SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR — every audit, evidence-grade.
Every monthly audit produces a versioned PDF + signed ticket trail. CFO + audit committee evidence pack includes:
- Methodology document — public at /methodology, version-stamped per audit
- Finding registry — each finding tagged with risk class, $-impact estimate, and remediation status
- PR / commit trail — engineering follow-through linked to specific findings (not just slide decks)
- Stakeholder sign-off — monthly executive briefing with attribution + decision log
- Retention — 7-year audit trail on R2 / object storage; auditor-grade chain of custody
Routinely accepted by SOC 2 Type II auditors as supplementary control evidence (CC7.x / CC8.x). For ISO 27001 / NIS2, maps to A.6 (organization of information security) and A.14 (acquisition, development, maintenance).
The $50K Audit Guarantee.
If your first monthly audit doesn't surface at least $50,000 in annualized recoverable waste across cost, security, or operational risk — we refund the full month.
Our prior 40+ engagements averaged $100K/yr in cost waste alone, before security or velocity recovery. The floor is half that. If your stack is already optimized beyond that line, the audit confirms it — and you owe nothing for the month.
Terms: applies to the first 30 days of any Audit Retainer tier. "Recoverable waste" means findings with an estimated >$50K/yr impact, defensible against the public methodology. Refund processed via Stripe within 5 business days. One refund per organization.
Three tiers. Pick by team size, not budget.
The audit is the platform. Engineering throughput scales with the tier. All tiers carry the $50K guarantee.
- Monthly audit + diff against prior
- 4 scoped engineering tickets shipped
- Monthly executive briefing
- SOC 2 / ISO control evidence pack
- Audit-trail retention 7yr on R2
- Everything in Pro
- Biweekly diff + drift alerts
- 8 scoped engineering tickets/mo
- SOC 2 Type II evidence pack
- Cost + latency PDF, monthly
- Everything in Scale
- Weekly architecture sync
- 16 engineering tickets/mo
- Multi-region / multi-tenant scope
- FedRAMP / ISO 27001 mapping support
Need a 1-pager for budget approval?
Reply to info@garnetgrid.com with your company size + cloud spend range, and we'll send back a one-page PDF: ROI math against your specific shape, scope of monthly delivery, contract terms, and a comparable hire / consultancy benchmark line. Usually within a few hours.
A platform team in a retainer line item.
Start Audit Pro for $4,999/mo. First audit landing in your dashboard within 7 days. Guaranteed $50K of recovered waste — or the month is free.