PAA vs a consultant
Software does the repetition. People do the judgment.
A traditional architecture review costs €10,000–25,000, takes weeks, and is only as consistent as the person who ran it. A good consultant earns that with judgment and context a tool can’t fake. The part that doesn’t need a human is the detection — finding the same misconfigurations by hand, engagement after engagement. PAA does that part in hours, from €99.
| Aspect | PAA | Consultant |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | From €99/day | €10,000–25,000 |
| Time | Hours | 2–4 weeks |
| Consistency | Same checks every run | Varies by who runs it |
| Remediation | Terraform / Bicep included | Recommendations |
| Tracking | Continuous + drift | Point-in-time |
| Human judgment | No | Yes |
What a consultant brings that PAA doesn’t
Judgment. A good one understands your business, weighs trade-offs against where the company is heading, facilitates the awkward conversation with stakeholders, and tells you which of the twenty findings actually matters this quarter. That’s real, and it’s not what a tool is for.
What PAA does better
Everything repeatable. The same 700+ checks every time, no fatigue, no “we ran out of hours so we sampled.” Results in hours instead of weeks. The remediation code attached. And it doesn’t leave when the engagement ends — it runs again next month and tells you what drifted.
The combination most people actually want
A consultant who runs PAA. The tool does the systematic detection and produces the evidence; the human adds the judgment and the relationship. You get consultant-grade insight without paying a senior engineer to manually hunt for public storage accounts. That’s why a number of Microsoft partners deliver PAA under their own brand.
Hire a consultant when…
You need bespoke strategy, business-context judgment, and someone to facilitate decisions with your stakeholders — not just a list of what’s wrong.
Use PAA when…
You want repeatable, consistent posture detection with evidence and remediation code, in hours, at a fraction of the cost — and kept current after the first run.
Questions
Does PAA replace an architecture consultant?
Not entirely, and it’s not meant to. A good consultant brings judgment, business context, and stakeholder facilitation that software doesn’t. What PAA replaces is the slow, manual, repetitive detection work — running the same checks by hand, every time. The strongest outcome is often a consultant using PAA to do the systematic part, then adding the human judgment on top.
How much cheaper is PAA than a consultant?
A traditional architecture review runs €10,000–25,000 and takes two to four weeks. PAA starts at €99 for a day pass and returns results in hours. For systematic posture detection and evidence, that’s a different order of magnitude. A consultant’s value is in judgment and context, not in manually finding the same misconfigurations every engagement.
I’m a consultant. Is PAA a threat to me?
The opposite. PAA does the detection and evidence-gathering that used to eat your billable hours, so you spend them on strategy and the client relationship. Many consultants and Microsoft partners run PAA under their own brand and resell it. There’s a day pass for exactly this.
Consultant-grade findings. From €99.
Run the assessment yourself, or talk to us about delivering it as a partner.
