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Emmanuel Christopher

Independent infrastructure consulting
Emmanuel Christopher

Production infrastructure for startups before they need a full-time infrastructure engineer.

For 3–10 person startups with a product in production and a founder or backend engineer still looking after it. I review what you have, fix what matters, and help keep it running.

Get an Infrastructure ReviewSee past work

$250–$400 · usually delivered within 2–4 business days. Scope agreed before starting.

Migration and production work for Carybin, Letsdap, and Dailzero.

Built for the awkward stage before your first infrastructure hire.

A good fit

  • A small technical team, usually 3–10 people.
  • Launched product, real users or paying customers.
  • Bootstrapped, pre-seed, seed, or similarly early.
  • A founder or backend engineer owns infrastructure.
  • Costs, deployments, or recovery need attention.

Probably not a fit

  • An idea with no production workload yet.
  • An established internal platform or SRE team.
  • A requirement for 24/7 managed operations.
  • Kubernetes without a workload that needs it.
  • The cheapest server, regardless of operational risk.

Start with a review. Take it from there.

Indicative pricing in USD

01 / Understand

Lean Infrastructure Review

$250–$400 · usually delivered within 2–4 business days

A practical assessment of whether your infrastructure fits your stage: cost, complexity, deployments, environments, backups and restore readiness, monitoring, databases, secrets, and production access.

You get a short, prioritized report: Keep · Fix now · Fix later · Stop paying for · Do not touch yet. Each recommendation explains why it matters and the tradeoff involved.

If we work together on implementation, I can credit the review fee toward the project.

Get an Infrastructure Review

02 / Fix

Infrastructure Fix Sprint

$750–$2,000+

A defined project for the useful work uncovered in the review. That might mean tested recovery, safer deployments, staging/production separation, monitoring, access and secrets fixes, or a migration that actually makes sense.

We agree the outcomes, scope, and project price before work starts. You get the changes, verification, and documentation needed to operate them.

The price depends on the workload and scope; larger projects can exceed this range.

03 / Maintain

Fractional Infrastructure Care

From $250/month

Light-touch ongoing infrastructure help for small systems: health checks, backup checks, deployment issues, small changes, upgrades, cost reviews, observability, and documentation.

We agree the work, availability, and incident-support limits up front. Larger scopes are quoted based on workload, availability, and the level of support required.

No 24/7 coverage or enterprise SLA.

Use the simplest infrastructure that is reliable enough for the business.

Sometimes the cheapest infrastructure is the infrastructure your engineers don’t have to maintain.

If Render and Supabase fit your workload and budget, keep them. Untested recovery or shared production credentials may deserve attention long before a hosting migration does.

I weigh cost, reliability, engineering time, and operational complexity together. “Your infrastructure is fine” is a useful outcome of a review.

The cloud bill keeps growing
Find what is actually expensive and whether changing it is worth the engineering time and operational responsibility.
Deployments feel fragile
Make releases repeatable, separate environments, and establish a clear rollback or recovery path.
Backups probably work
Check what is being backed up, test a restore, and document how to recover when production fails.
The CTO is the infra team
Reduce repetitive work and document the system so deployments and production access don't depend on one person.
Production grew organically
Review the shortcuts that accumulated, improve visibility, and fix the ones that now put customers at risk.

Decisions from real client work.

These engagements involved migrations. A review of your setup may recommend keeping it exactly where it is.

Carybin

Bring the setup back in line with the company's stage.

Read the migration case study
The situation
The existing managed infrastructure had become too expensive for the team’s stage.
The decision
Move the workload to a self-hosted Coolify setup on Hetzner, with a setup the team could manage themselves.
The result
Carybin's core hosting went from about $300/month to €8/month, with a setup the team could understand and operate themselves.
The important part
Self-hosting transfers responsibility for the server to the team. A lower bill only helps when operating the replacement is manageable.

Letsdap

Move application hosting. Keep the database managed.

Read the infrastructure decisions
The situation
The team was paying for managed capacity it barely used across its existing application and storage services.
The decision
Move application compute to Hetzner with Dokploy and files to Cloudflare R2, while keeping MongoDB managed to limit the impact of a server failure.
The result
Letsdap's founder reports roughly 90% lower hosting costs and 65% lower total recurring infrastructure spend. MongoDB stayed managed, with separate environments and recovery procedures included in the handover.
The important part
Keeping MongoDB managed preserves a separate failure boundary. Putting every service on the same server would make a server failure harder to recover from.

Dailzero

Migrate the workload and document how to operate it.

Read the migration and handover case study
The situation
The founder needed help carrying out a full infrastructure migration.
The decision
Migrate the application and PostgreSQL/pgvector workloads, check data integrity, and document deployment and recovery procedures.
The result
Production and staging were migrated, scheduled database backups were verified, and a restore from Cloudflare R2 was tested in staging. The founder received operating documentation.
The important part
Moving hosting also moves operational responsibility. Clear communication helps the founder understand what is changing and what the team will own afterward.

In their own words.

“He handled the migration end to end and left us with a setup the team could understand and manage ourselves.”

Favour Anwara · CTOCarybin
More from this recommendation

“Emmanuel helped us move away from an infrastructure setup that had become too expensive for our stage, reducing our core infrastructure cost by more than 95%.”

View recommendations

“He then ran a live session walking us through what he'd built and left us documentation for operations, the migration itself, and the architecture, so we can deploy, read logs, and roll back without him. He was thorough, self-directed, and easy to work with.”

Joshua Nwankwo · FounderLetsdap
More from this recommendation

“As an early-stage startup, we were paying for managed infrastructure we barely used, with most months leaving half the capacity we were billed for untouched.”

“Emmanuel got on calls to understand our stack first, then handled the whole migration himself: web app, API, background workers, queues, database, and file storage moved onto a self-hosted setup, with verified backups and a rollback path open the whole way.”

“Our recurring infrastructure spend came down by roughly 65%, the hosting portion alone by close to 90%, with no data lost and nothing broken for our users.”

View recommendations

“I had the pleasure of working with Emmanuel on a full migration of our infrastructure, and I can't recommend him highly enough. From start to finish he was thorough, organized, and completely on top of every detail.”

Ibrahim Doba · FounderDailzero
More from this recommendation

“What could have been a stressful, disruptive process turned out to be smooth and seamless, he moved everything over with zero downtime and kept me clearly informed at every step.”

“The impact has been immediate: our services now run noticeably faster and more reliably than before, and the whole setup feels more solid and easier to manage.”

“Emmanuel clearly knows infrastructure and DevOps at a deep level, but just as importantly, he's dependable, communicates well, and genuinely cares about doing the job right. If you're looking for someone to handle a migration or take ownership of your infrastructure, Emmanuel is the person you want. Highly recommended.”

View recommendations

My broader work spans production infrastructure, deployment pipelines, observability, incident debugging, and data systems. Tools include AWS, Cloudflare, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Explore the project archive.

Get an Infrastructure Review

Tell me what you’re running and what’s starting to hurt. I’ll first determine whether there’s actually anything worth changing.

  1. I read what you’ve shared and follow up with any questions.
  2. We agree the review scope and fee ($250–$400 USD) before starting.
  3. You get a short report and decide what, if anything, to implement.

If your current setup is already reasonable, I’ll tell you that too. Submitting this form doesn’t commit you to a paid engagement.

Prefer email? consulting@krissemmy.com

Only name, work email, and company are required.

Please don’t include passwords, API keys, or other secrets.

Add context about your team and stack (optional)

This sends an inquiry. We’ll agree scope, price, and availability before any work begins.