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A consultancy that refuses the script

We’re the engineers you call when the cloud bill stops being funny.

Cloudico, est. 2022 Lahore · serving
Series A–C teams
globally

Six senior engineers Zero SDRs
Zero juniors
Zero CRM
nurture sequences

We’re a small consultancy built for the moment when your infrastructure becomes the thing slowing the company down. We don’t do discovery decks. We don’t do junior bait-and-switch. We don’t auto-renew you. Every engagement is led by a senior engineer who’s shipped production AWS and AI infrastructure for years — the same person you’ll talk to on the first call.

02 Position

What we refuse to do.

Most consultancies hide their position behind soft language. We’d rather state ours flatly. If any of this disqualifies us, we’d rather you find out now.

01
SDRs cold-emailing your VP Eng
Instead The engineer who’d do the work writes to you, not a sales rep with a quota. No sequenced emails. No "checking in." If you go quiet, we assume you’ll come back.
02
Junior bait-and-switch after the proposal lands
Instead The named engineer on the proposal is the same engineer who ships. No "we’ll get a team on it." We don’t staff with juniors because we don’t hire any.
03
Discovery decks billed at $30k
Instead Free 30-minute first call, written scope in 48 hours if we’re a fit. Or honest "we’re not the right fit" + 2 competitor referrals.
04
Auto-renewing quarterly contracts
Instead Every monthly retainer is cancel-anytime, no notice required. If we’re not delivering value, leaving us should be one Slack message.
05
Reselling AWS / GPU credits with a markup
Instead Your cloud bill stays in your account. We never resell compute. Our incentive is your spend going down, not up.
06
Body-shop staffing dressed up as "consultancy"
Instead We cap concurrent engagements at eight at any time. Not eight teams — eight projects total. That’s the entire firm. Every project gets senior attention.
07
Vague pricing that depends on who’s asking
Instead Fixed-scope, fixed-price on the website. No "let’s discuss your budget." If we miss the timeline, you don’t pay for the overrun.
03 Numbers

The operational reality.

Not vanity metrics. These are the actual numbers that describe how we work — the kind your procurement team would ask about anyway. We’d rather just publish them.

Years operating Since 2022
4
Engagements completed Across Cloud, Cost, Reliability, AI
47
Senior engineers on staff Average 11 years' production experience
6
SDRs · Juniors · Account managers By design, not by accident
0
Average engagement length From kickoff to handover
11wk
Clients who came back for a second engagement Of the 47 completed · 66%
31
Concurrent engagement cap Total. Not "per team." Just total.
8
Honest "not us" referrals sent When we’re not the right fit
19
04 The team

The engineers who’d actually do the work.

Three named senior engineers run every engagement. There’s no bench. There’s no "team" hiding behind a logo. These are the humans you’ll be on calls with from week one to handover.

Hassan Ali, Founder
01 · Founder
Lahore, Pakistan
Founder · Cloud & AI Infra

Hassan Ali.

Started Cloudico in 2022 after a decade running production AWS infrastructure at fintechs and AI-native startups. Migrated three companies off of vendor lock-in; the first one is what convinced him to build a consultancy that does only this.

Lead engineer on every AI Infrastructure engagement. The person who decides whether vLLM vs Triton vs TensorRT-LLM is the right call for your workload — usually within the first 20 minutes of looking at your inference logs.

Years in production
12+
Certifications
AWS Solutions Architect Pro
Currently reading
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Maryam Khan, Senior SRE
02 · Senior SRE
Lahore, Pakistan
Senior SRE · Reliability Engineering

Maryam Khan.

Joined Cloudico in 2023 after running SRE for a Series C SaaS through the on-call hell that comes with 99.5% → 99.99% uptime targets. The reason we publish median MTTR numbers on the Reliability page — she insisted we be specific or not claim anything.

Owns every Reliability Engineering sprint. Designs the SLOs with your product team, tunes the alerts, runs the fire drills, and facilitates the first three postmortems with your engineering org before handover.

Years in SRE
9
Specialty
Multi-region DR + SLO design
Currently reading
Implementing Service Level Objectives
David Reyes, ML Platform Engineer
03 · ML Platform
Remote · Lisbon
ML Platform Engineer · AI Infrastructure

David Reyes.

The reason Cloudico has an AI Infrastructure practice at all. Spent four years at an AI-native unicorn building the inference platform that cut their Bedrock dependency in nine months. Joined in 2024 to do the same kind of work for other teams.

Specializes in vLLM, Triton, and the operational details of running LLM inference at production scale. The person who’ll explain to your CFO why your Bedrock bill compounds non-linearly — with the actual graph.

Years in ML platform
7
Specialty
vLLM tuning + cost engineering
Currently reading
The vLLM PagedAttention paper, again

Plus three additional senior engineers on rotation · no contractors, no juniors, no offshoring

05 Operating principles

How we actually run a consultancy.

Not "our values" — we don’t do values posters. These are the operating principles that decide what we will and won’t do, with the real consequences attached.

I
The named engineer on the proposal is the engineer who ships.

No staffing changes mid-engagement. No "our principal architect designed the scope, here’s the senior who’ll execute it." The person on the first call is the person who writes the Terraform.

Real consequence

We cap concurrent engagements at 8 firm-wide. We turn work away rather than break this.

II
When we’re not the right fit, we send 2 referrals.

Your problem isn’t our problem to win. If a competitor would do better work for your situation — pricing, geography, specialty, urgency — we name two of them on the call and end the meeting on time.

Real consequence

19 engagements sent out as referrals to date. Most of those teams now refer work back when they’re overbooked.

III
We hand over the work. We don’t become a dependency.

Every engagement ends with a real handover — recorded walkthroughs, runbooks, and 30 days of post-handover Slack support. After that, your team owns it. We’re not building a managed services annuity here.

Real consequence

Most engagements end cleanly. The teams that come back (66% of clients) do so because they have a new problem — not because they can’t run what we built.

IV
If we miss the timeline, you don’t pay for the overrun.

Fixed-scope, fixed-price. Written in the proposal. If we underestimated the work, that’s our cost to absorb — not yours. You pay what was quoted, on the date that was quoted.

Real consequence

We’ve eaten ~$80k in overruns across 47 engagements. That’s the price of taking estimation seriously.

V
We publish what we know. Open source. Public writing.

The patterns we use in client work end up in public — Terraform modules, blog posts, talks, GitHub repos. If your team finds our content first and never hires us, that’s a successful outcome too.

Real consequence

14 open-source releases. 23 long-form essays. We get hired in part because our public work shows up before our marketing does.

06 Where we are

Built in Lahore. Shipped globally.

We don’t hide where we’re based or pretend to be a different city than we are. Lahore is home. The work is global.

31.5204° N, 74.3587° E

Lahore is where the work happens.

Cloudico is built in Lahore, Pakistan — not a remote-friendly tagline, not a "global remote team" euphemism. The senior engineers running your engagement work from the same time zone, with the same operational disciplines we’d apply if we were sitting in Brooklyn or Berlin.

What that means in practice: your calls happen on a normal Western business calendar. Asia-Pacific clients get even better coverage. The four-hour-response promise is calibrated to PKT business hours (UTC+5), and our typical overlap with US Pacific is 2–3 hours every workday.

Time zone PKT (UTC+5)
US Pacific overlap 7–10am PT
EU overlap 12–5pm CET
Clients in US · UK · EU · SEA · AU
Lahore HQ
07 Public work

What we’ve put out in public.

Open-source releases, long-form essays, conference talks, upstream contributions. The patterns we use in client work end up here. If you find this list useful and never hire us, that’s still a win.

14 open-source releases · 23 long-form essays · 7 conference talks · see all

08 From the founder

A note, unedited.

Most "about" pages give you a mission statement written by committee. This is a letter from Hassan, written once, lightly edited, never sent through marketing review.

From Hassan Ali · Founder, Cloudico · Lahore, May 2026
If you’ve scrolled this far, this part is for you.

The consultancy industry has a credibility problem. You know it. I know it. The teams I’ve worked alongside — on both sides — know it. Discovery calls that are really qualification screens. Junior engineers shipping work that was sold by principals. Sequenced emails from people you’ve never met, asking if the proposal "still makes sense for your priorities." Auto-renewing contracts that nobody remembers signing.

I started Cloudico because I wanted to build a different kind of firm — one where the senior engineer who shows up on the first call is the same one who writes the code three months later. Where pricing is on the website. Where if we miss the timeline, we eat the cost. Where if we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you who is — and mean it.

This sounds idealistic until you realize the math works. We cap engagements at eight. That’s the whole firm. It means we have to be honest about what we can deliver, because we can’t outrun a bad reputation by churning through new logos. The math forces the discipline.

The clients who’ve hired us — 47 engagements across four years — tell us the thing they remember most is the first call. Not because we did anything clever on it. Because we showed up prepared, gave honest answers, and didn’t try to sell. That’s a low bar in this industry, and clearing it is most of what we do.

If your infrastructure is the thing slowing your company down right now — the AWS bill, the on-call rotation, the inference cost, the migration that’s been "next quarter" for two years — we’d like to look at it with you. Worst case, we’re not the right fit and we send you two referrals. Best case, we ship the work and disappear when you don’t need us anymore.

Either way, no CRM sequences. You have my word.

Hassan Ali
Founder · Cloudico · hassan@cloudico.co
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