u/RazzmatazzFlat2808

Posting this because I want to know if anyone else is in the same boat. Bear with me, there’s a question at the end.
A few years ago I was a senior PAM engineer at a consulting firm. CyberArk specialist, the guy they sent in when something was on fire. I was good at it. I was also getting paid a salary while the firm was billing me out at rates that, when I eventually saw the numbers on an invoice by accident, made me want to flip a desk.
The client was paying around 1,400 a day for my time. I was on roughly 65k a year. Do the maths. After tax, social, and the days I wasn’t billable, I was taking home maybe 220 a day of work the company was charging 1,400 for. And I was the one in the meetings with the IAM Managers on client side, I was the one writing the reports, basicly I was working as a freelance but with a fixed salary.
So I started doing health checks on the side. Quietly at first. I offered a LinkedIn “friend” to look at their environment for a small fee. Then someone they knew. Then a recruiter who’d been bugging me for months connected me with a mid sized company that didn’t want to pay a consulting firm 50k for a two week assessment, and I did the same work for 8k as a freelancer. They got a better report than the firm would have given them, because I wasn’t being rushed to close the project and move to the next one.
At some point I had three side clients running at the same time. One was a small bank doing a quarterly health check. One was a manufacturer that wanted help cleaning up their platforms after a botched upgrade. One was an MSP that wanted me on retainer for escalations their team couldn’t handle. I was billing more on the side in a month than my employer was paying me. And I was still working full time. Evenings, weekends, holidays. It was unsustainable but the money was real in a way the salary had never felt real.
The day I handed in my notice I was almost shaking.

Freelancing has been the best move of my career. More money, better clients, no manager, no internal politics, no being billed out at five times what I’m paid. If you’re in PAM and you’ve got the experience, the freelance market is genuinely good right now. Clients are sick of paying big firms for mediocre consultants and they’re actively looking for independent specialists.

A couple of real questions for the other freelancers here.
Do you work with your own templates? Over the years I’ve ended up with a pretty solid set of mine, basically pulling together the best bits from every employer I’ve worked at. Each company had their own version of a health check report, scoping document, breakglass process, remediation plan, and they were all decent in different ways. I took what worked from each one and built my own. Now my deliverables look more professional than what most of those firms ship to clients, and I’m one person. Curious if others have done the same or if you’re starting from scratch with each engagement.

The other one, which services are actually paying best for you? For me the health check is always the first engagement I do with a new client, and the one I dedicate the most time to. Not because it’s the most profitable on its own, but because it’s the door opener. A good health check almost always leads to bigger follow on work, remediation, upgrades, migrations, retainer engagements, all the stuff that actually pays well and takes real time. The health check is where the trust gets built. What’s working for the rest of you? Anyone landing big projects without going through that initial assessment first?

Hey, hoping for some critical eyes before I push harder on this.
Store has been live a couple of weeks, 13 real customers in, and I’m starting to think I might be pricing this wrong on the low end.
What it is: a CyberArk Health Check Playbook. A pack of templates for PAM engineers looking to start freelancing on the side while keeping their job at a tech company. The goal is to let them audit a CyberArk deployment fast on a client engagement: checklists, audit queries, common misconfigurations, the stuff that took me years of consulting work to actually consolidate into something usable.
59€ once, no subscription.
Context on the price: the internal version of this playbook has generated me well into 5 figures in consulting engagements over the years. 59€ for the productized version felt almost too low given what one freelance gig with it pays back, but I picked it because I wanted a number that wouldn’t need manager approval to expense.
The 13 buyers I have didn’t hesitate at the price, which usually means you’re underpriced.
What I’d love to hear:
• Is 59€ too low for a specialist B2B audit resource? CyberArk training courses run 2000€+.
• Does the landing page match the price, or does it undersell what’s inside?
• Would 99€ or 149€ convert better in this niche?
• What’s the first thing that makes you want to close the tab?
cyberarkplaybook.com

Honest feedback welcome, even if it’s ‘looks too cheap to take seriously’.

Been doing CyberArk for 10 years, last few doing independent health checks on the side. Sharing the pricing mistakes that actually cost me money, in case it helps anyone here thinking of going independent.

1. Charged hourly the first time. Finished in 9 days what I'd quoted as "around 2 weeks". Made half of what the work was worth. Go fixed-fee.
2. Quoted without scoping. "We have CyberArk, can you review it?" turned into a Vault cluster + 4 CPMs + a PSM farm + Conjur. Now I do a 30 min scoping call before any number leaves my mouth.
3. Bundled remediation into the health check. Once you find 40 issues in a fixed-fee report, guess who fixes them for free. Two engagements, always.
4. Underpriced because "it's just a review". The report is what lands them their next big remediation project. Started at 3k, my floor now is 12k.
5. Did a free "quick look" before quoting. Wasted 4 hours, client ghosted. Paid scoping or nothing.
6. Wrote the report too technical. 60 pages of CPM error codes. CISO didn't read past page 2. Now: 1-page exec summary up front, technical stuff in appendices.
7. Treated the exec readout as "included". That 1h call is where the follow-on work gets sold. Charge for it.
8. No scope-creep clause. "While you're at it..." used to mean free work. Now every SoW has an out-of-scope list and a CR rate.
9. Quoted in the same call. Said a number, it became the ceiling. Now: "I'll send a proposal in 48h." Every time.
10. Didn't follow up after delivery. ~70% of my follow-on work comes from a 30-day check-in email. People don't come back to you on their own.

Wrote all this up properly (frameworks, templates, the actual SoW I use) as a playbook. Not going to drop a link, DM me or check my profile if you want it.

What would you add?