// who we are
A small hive of senior AWS engineers.
Based in Lagos. Engineers across UTC, EST, and WAT. Certified by the people who built the cloud — and on call across a 16-hour window without anyone working overnight.
OUR APPROACH
We don't believe in "cloud-agnostic." By going all-in on AWS, we leverage the full depth of their ecosystem to build faster, more secure, and more cost-effective solutions than generalists ever could.
OUR STANDARD
Infrastructure is code. Security is non-negotiable. If it's not automated, it's a liability. We hold ourselves to the highest technical standards in every pull request we ship.
OUR PROMISE
We ship in slices. You'll see real infrastructure in production every two weeks. No six-month blackout periods, no complex slide decks. Just working code.
// how we run projects
Four phases. No slide-deck theatre.
DISCOVER
We ask annoying questions. About scale, about tradeoffs, about what's actually broken versus what just feels slow.
// deliverable: a written assessment, not a slide deck.
ARCHITECT
We draw the thing before we build it. You see the diagram, the IAM model, and the cost estimate before any code is written.
// deliverable: a reviewed architecture and a fixed-fee proposal.
BUILD
We ship in slices. You can stop us after any milestone and have something working in production.
// deliverable: live infrastructure, every two weeks.
OPERATE
We don't disappear after go-live. Most clients keep us on for managed services or quarterly reviews.
// deliverable: an on-call rotation that includes us.
// straight answers
Questions worth a clear answer.
If yours isn't here, email admin@fortbees.com — a senior engineer reads every one and replies inside a business day.
Usually, yes — we run leaner overhead and bill fixed-fee instead of time-and-materials. But not always. For very large multi-team programmes, ProServe brings scale we don't have. If you're better off with them, we'll say so on the first call and walk away from the engagement.
We don't take engagements under about $15,000. Below that, you're better served by a senior freelancer, a one-off architecture review, or — frankly — a well-timed Reserved Instance purchase. None of those need a consulting firm. Email us anyway and we'll point you somewhere useful.
No. GCP, Azure, on-prem, hybrid — all real, all supported by competent partners. We've chosen depth on one cloud over breadth across three. If your stack is somewhere else, we'll tell you on the first call rather than learn together at your expense.
Fixed-fee for scoped projects, flat monthly retainer for managed services. No hourly billing. No scope-creep change orders. The price you see in week one is the price you pay in week eight. If something genuinely changes scope, we re-scope together — in writing — before any extra work starts.
Discovery and architecture: one to two weeks. Build phase ships in two-week slices — you can stop us at any milestone with something working in production. Most projects close inside eight to sixteen weeks. Migrations of 100+ services run longer; we tell you the realistic number in writing before you sign.
Yes — about half our work starts as cleanup of inherited infrastructure: undocumented IAM, drift between Terraform and the console, NAT gateways nobody owns, six VPCs where two would do. We won't shame the previous team. We will get the diagram to match what's actually deployed, then make the deployment match what should be there.
For managed-services clients: yes — covered by an on-call rotation across UTC, EST, and WAT. That's a 16-hour window without anyone being woken up at 3am, which we think matters for sustainable response times. For project-only clients we cover business hours in your timezone, with a documented escalation path for true emergencies.
Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. Engineers also work from Abuja, Cape Town, and London. Our clients sit across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, the UK, and the US — anywhere you need someone fluent in NDPA 2023, GDPR, and AWS af-south-1 latency in the same conversation.