Software Consultant in Bangalore — Independent, and Paid to Say No

An independent advisory day rate in India runs ₹25,000–₹75,000, and most useful engagements are two to eight days. So a second opinion on a quote is ₹25,000–₹1,00,000, a scoping sprint ₹50,000–₹2,50,000, and an architecture review ₹75,000–₹4,00,000. A large consulting firm bills ₹1,50,000–₹3,00,000 a day for the same calendar time. Everything is quoted as a fixed number of days against a written brief, so you know the total before it starts.

A developer builds what you specify; a consultant works out what to specify. If you can already describe what you want, hire a developer and do not pay consulting rates to have it described again. The full version of that argument, including when you need neither, is in software consultant or software developer?

Yes, and it is the most common finding on a build-versus-buy engagement. Most business needs are ordinary — accounting, CRM, payroll, helpdesk, scheduling — and ordinary needs have products that cost a fraction of a custom build and are maintained by somebody else. An agency offering a free consultation is structurally unable to reach that conclusion, which is what makes the free version expensive.

No, and that is written into the engagement. The findings document is addressed to a decision-maker, not to me, and is deliberately written so any developer or agency could execute it. A consultant whose recommendations always conclude "hire me to build this" is a salesperson with a nicer invoice.

A software audit reads the codebase: ownership and licensing, dependency currency, architecture, security, test coverage, deployment and documentation — ₹40,000–₹1,50,000. The IT audit on the IT consulting page is ₹25,000–₹75,000 and covers the estate instead: assets, licences, backups, access and infrastructure risk. The difference is not inconsistency. Reading code takes materially longer than inventorying hardware, and most businesses need one of the two rather than both.

That is one of the most common reasons people call, and on a large quote it is the highest-return money in this list. Three days against an ₹18 lakh build is under 2% of the budget, and the usual finding is that the scope should be materially smaller or shaped differently. Send me the quote and the brief it was written against — if there was no brief, that is already the first finding.

An audit, before anyone changes anything. Somebody has to establish what exists, who owns it, where the accounts are, what it depends on and what will break first. Changing code in a system nobody has mapped is how a bad situation becomes an outage. The audit output is the map, and it is yours whether or not I do anything else.

Yes, as a retainer of named days a month at ₹40,000–₹1,50,000 — reviews, vendor conversations and decisions as they arise. It suits a business with real technical decisions to make and no need for a full-time technology leader. What it is not is an unstructured retainer: the days are stated, and so is what happens to them if you do not use them.

I am based in Bengaluru, which matters for the first session of an audit or a scoping sprint — the useful information usually comes from watching people work rather than from a call, and that is easier in a room. Everything after that runs remotely, and plenty of this work is delivered for clients nowhere near Bengaluru. Nothing about reviewing a codebase requires me to be in your city.

Web and mobile application stacks, cloud architecture on AWS and Azure, databases, and AI and LLM systems. Where I will tell you I am the wrong person: embedded firmware, anything safety-critical, and deep data-science modelling. An honest "not me, and here is what to look for in who you hire" is a legitimate outcome of a scoping call, and it costs nothing.

Usually within a few days for a short engagement, and a scoping call first costs nothing. If the answer on that call is "you do not need a consultant, you need a developer", I will say so then rather than invoice you for discovering it.

What you are trying to do, what exists already, who has worked on it, and any quote or brief in hand. Access comes later and only if the engagement needs it. That is enough for a fixed number of days and a fixed price within 24 hours.