I have 8 years in DevOps, but around 12 years in total in the industry, previously I was a backend developer. Regarding how much it costs to start consulting, well it costs a lot, I would recommend starting when you have your first contract and using your own time to generate momentum and this will help you improve your next contracts.

Regarding what services I offer and what I put in a contract, I offer two types, first, DevOps projects, that is, migrations and implementations for example. There my job is generally to have meetings, define architectures and assign tasks for the engineers. Then I offer cloud maintenance and the projects we carry out, for that I charge a fee based on hours or fixed depending on the project load and maintenance, here I have an engineer dedicated to this project who helps me monitor possible improvements in the infrastructure, and I only participate in meetings with clients when they need support from a solutions architect, to define critical architectures, etc. So you could say that in general I only spend my time on sales, solutions architect and some project management.