Fixed scope, fixed price: how we quote work

There is no pricing page on this site. That is deliberate, and it is the question we get asked earliest, so it is worth answering plainly.

Every item of work we do is priced. Not vaguely, not as a range, not as a starting-at number. Priced, with a fixed scope and a delivery estimate attached, in writing. That pricing arrives in your Diagnostic Audit, against your business, after we have looked at it.

What we will not do is print a number on a page before we know what the job is.

Why the number is not on this page

A published price for a website or an automation or a visibility project is a number attached to an imaginary job. It is either high enough to cover the worst version of that job, in which case it scares off the people whose job is simple, or it is low enough to look attractive, in which case it is a lure and the real number arrives later.

Both are dishonest in the same direction. They quote a scope nobody has defined.

The difference between two websites with the same page count can be enormous. One is a rebuild on a domain the client controls with photos already taken and copy already written. The other needs the domain recovered from a vendor who stopped answering, the content written from scratch, a booking tool connected, and a decade of directory listings repointed. Calling both of those the same job, at the same price, would require one of the two clients to subsidize the other.

So the price comes after the diagnosis. That order is the whole point.

What fixed scope actually means

An item in your audit is not a heading. It is a defined unit of work with four things attached.

• What is included. Written out specifically enough that both of us can tell whether it happened. Not “website improvements.” A named set of pages, a named integration, a named cleanup.
• What is not included. The boundary, stated. This is the part most quotes leave out and the part that prevents most arguments.
• A fixed price for that scope. One number for that item. Not an estimate, not an hourly rate multiplied by a guess.
• A delivery estimate. How long it takes, in days or weeks, so you can sequence it against your own calendar.

Every item stands alone. That is what makes it possible to take three items and leave nine, or to do two now and revisit the rest after your busy season. A quote that only works as a bundle is not a set of items. It is one item with a menu printed on it.

The risk of a fixed price sits with us, by design. If the work takes longer than we estimated, the price does not move. That is the trade you are being offered, and it is the reason we do the diagnosis first.

What happens when scope changes

It changes sometimes. Not often, and almost never quietly.

Two things can happen mid-project. Either you want something that was not in the scope, or we find something underneath the work that nobody could see from the outside. An old site that turns out to be running on a platform nobody can access. A data set that is dirtier than the sample suggested.

The handling is the same in both cases. Work stops on that item, we tell you what we found, and we price the change as its own scoped item with its own number. You approve it or you do not. If you do not, we finish the original scope as written or we stop, and either way you are not billed for something you did not agree to.

What does not happen is a surprise on an invoice. If you did not approve a line item, there is no line item.

Why hourly billing punishes the efficient

Hourly rates sound fair. They are the standard in most trades and in most of the software business, and there is nothing dishonest about them.

But look at what they reward. Under an hourly arrangement, the faster we solve your problem, the less we make. Experience, better tools, a pattern we have run before, all of it reduces our revenue on that job. The incentive points at slow work, and even when nobody acts on that incentive, you are stuck supervising a meter.

It is worse than that on your side. Hourly means you cannot know what anything costs until it is over. You cannot compare two paths, you cannot budget the quarter, and you cannot say no to the fourth item because you do not know what the first three will come to.

Fixed price moves that risk to us and gives you a number you can decide against. We get paid for solving the problem, so being good at it is worth something. That is the arrangement we want on both sides.

How the total gets built live

Here is the part that surprises people.

The strategy briefing is an hour, and when we get to money, you do not get a PDF with a total at the bottom. We open the investment summary together, on screen, with every recommended item listed and priced.

Then we go through it. As we talk about what matters most and what fits your timing, items toggle on and off, and the total recalculates in front of you. You watch the number move as you make the decisions that move it. If phase one is all you want this year, we turn off the rest and the total is what phase one costs. If two items belong after your busy season, we mark them and they come out.

When we agree on what is in and what is out, the same page produces a statement of work and a master services agreement from exactly that selection. You sign when you are ready. Not on the call under pressure, and not against a scope that was decided somewhere you were not in the room.

There is no minimum commitment. You can take everything, a few items, or nothing at all, and the audit stays yours regardless.

A price is only meaningful next to a scope. Publish the price without the scope and you have published a guess.

If you want to see what that looks like against your business, it starts with a free discovery meeting. 30 minutes, no obligation.