Architecture decisions without the consulting bill.
Describe what you are building. Archknot conducts a 15-domain interview, compares viable cloud, SaaS, and hardware strategies, models deterministic cost and risk, and produces an implementation-ready architecture.
Watch trade-offs converge into balanced architectures
Toggle architectural targets or drag the workload slider. Deterministic diagonal guide vectors dynamically balance cloud compute, databases, compliance isolation, and cost models in real time.
Balanced Multi-Cloud Serverless
GCP Cloud Run + Neon PostgreSQL + Cloudflare Edge
Fully reproducible architecture decisions
Above the vendors
A cloud advisor starts from a cloud. This starts from your problem.
Ask a provider's own tool how to build something and the answer is always that provider. Most of the money is decided one level up, before that question is asked at all:
- Should this workload be on AWS at all?
- Would SaaS, managed cloud, open source or owned hardware serve you better?
- Should this call a hosted AI API or run a self-hosted model?
- Should the database be managed, or do you need to run it yourself?
- Kubernetes, serverless, containers or plain virtual machines?
- Buy GPUs, rent them by the hour, or use serverless inference?
- Build this capability, or buy it from someone who already has it?
How it works
Five steps from a paragraph to a buildable architecture
Describe what you are building
A paragraph is enough to start. No sizing spreadsheet required.
Answer a structured interview
The questions adapt to what you have already said, and cover the constraints people usually forget: data residency, recovery targets, growth, team size and budget.
Review what was captured
Every requirement is labelled confirmed, inferred or an assumption, so nothing unverified quietly becomes a fact.
Compare the viable options
Cost, operational effort, lock-in, risk and compliance readiness, side by side and costed against your own constraints.
Take an implementation-ready architecture
A selected architecture, the decisions recorded behind it, and generated Terraform you review and apply yourself.
Try the interview
One paragraph in, the questions that matter out
Edit the example, or replace it with your own system, and see what the interview reads from it and asks next.
This preview reads your description against the same question set the full consultation uses, with plain text matching rather than a language model. It shows you the questions it would ask. It does not produce a costed architecture - that needs your answers.
Why you can rely on it
Recommendations you can defend in a design review
Vendor-neutral by construction
The comparison includes staying where you are, buying instead of building, and not using the cloud at all. No provider pays for placement.
Decisions you can audit
Every recommendation carries the requirements that drove it and the alternatives it beat, recorded as decision records you can review and share.
Architecture and economics together
Cost models sit beside the architecture rather than in a separate spreadsheet, and each figure states whether it is an estimate or a confirmed number.
Compliance readiness, not certification
Technical controls are mapped against HIPAA and GDPR architecture considerations, with what falls outside architecture scope listed explicitly.
Terraform you can read before you run
Infrastructure code is generated from the selected architecture, so it can be reviewed, versioned and applied by your own process.
Nothing is changed for you
Archknot holds no credentials to your cloud accounts and never writes to your production infrastructure.
Each of those has a page explaining how it works and where it stops: the methodology and the full workflow.
What it does not do
The limits, stated on the page
Architecture tooling earns trust by being clear about its boundaries. Here are ours, before you sign up rather than after.
It does not touch your production systems
There is no automatic apply. You review the plan and the code, then deploy with whatever process you already trust.
It is not legal advice or certification
Compliance output covers technical architecture considerations only. Confirming regulatory compliance, signing a BAA, or verifying employee policy stays with you and your counsel.
Cost figures are modelled, not quoted
Costs are modelled from a maintained catalog of baseline component prices, not live quotes, and they are labelled as estimates. Your actual bill depends on usage, region and any discount you hold. Dated provider pricing snapshots with source links are a stated requirement and are not in place yet.
The output is only as good as the constraints
Recommendations follow the requirements you confirm. Anything inferred or assumed is labelled as such, so you can see what is worth double-checking.
This assessment covers technical architecture considerations only and does not constitute legal advice, certification, or confirmation of regulatory compliance.
Plans
Priced against a consulting engagement, not per seat
One architecture review from a consultancy costs more than a year of this.
- Start free
Free
Free
For trying one assessment end to end.
- Architecture projects - 1
- Architecture strategies - 1
- Cost modelling - High-level only
- Risk assessment - High-level only
- Report export - Restricted
- Usage allowance - Limited
- Start with Architect
Architect
$79/ month
For a CTO or tech lead designing a system.
- Architecture projects - Unlimited
- Architecture strategies - Full set
- Cost modelling - Full cost models
- Risk assessment - Full
- Decision records (ADRs) - Included
- Terraform export - Included
- Start with Team
Team
Most chosen$299/ month
For a team standardising how architecture gets decided.
- Report export - Team exports
- Collaboration - Included
- Shared projects - Included
- Version history - Included
- Organization settings - Included
- Usage allowance - Higher
- Talk to us
Business
$999+/ month
For several teams with their own standards and constraints.
- Usage allowance - Highest
- Policy customization - Included
- Advanced controls - Included
- Priority support - Included
- Organization governance - Included
Vendor-neutral architecture decisionsStart with the problem you are actually solving
Describe the system in a paragraph. The interview takes it from there, and you can stop at any point with everything captured so far.
The Reality of Manual Architecture
Why engineering teams lose months to trial-and-error
Every team begins with a whiteboard, good intentions, and subjective opinions.
Draft 1: Monolith on Single EC2
Crashed during Friday launch • 100% CPU lockup
Draft 2: 32 Microservices Split
Circular dependency deadlocks • 18 GitHub repos
Draft 3: Serverless Everything
Cold starts > 4.2s • Unexpected $38k AWS bill
Draft 4: Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Mesh
Too complex for 4 devs • Zero production deploys
“There has to be a better way to design this.”
Architecture shouldn’t be a guessing game of trial-and-error, costly consultant hourly retainers, or 3 AM outages.
Archknot interviews your requirements, models 3 cloud strategies with inspectable FinOps and STRIDE risk profiles, and generates production Terraform in minutes.
No signup or login required — experience the complete product end-to-end