How we think about pricing

Most agencies bill the same way for everything. We don’t, because no single billing model is right for every kind of work. Our default is a fixed price for a defined project, but we also work on retainers and, when it genuinely fits, by the hour. The model should match the engagement, not the other way around. Here’s how we think about it.

Our default: fixed price for a defined project

When the work can be scoped, fixed price is almost always the right call, and it’s where we start. We scope the project, write down what’s included, and quote a single price. If we go over, that’s our problem. If we go under, that’s our advantage.

The reason we prefer it isn’t dogma, it’s incentives. Billing purely by the hour quietly rewards the wrong things: you get paid more for taking longer, more when the code is harder to maintain, more when the team is slower. A fixed price points our incentive the same direction as yours, ship the right thing, fast. You also get something hourly can’t give you up front: a known number. Before any code is written, you have a written scope, a written price, and a written timeline you can sign off on. No surprises in month four.

That’s why, for a website, an app, a migration, or any project with a definable finish line, we’ll almost always quote it fixed. (We go deep on how that works in Fixed scope, explained.)

When a retainer makes more sense

Not all work has a finish line. If you want senior people available on an ongoing basis, a steady stream of improvements, design and development capacity you can draw on month to month, then a monthly retainer is the honest fit. You’re not buying a project; you’re buying ongoing access, and the pricing should reflect that.

We do this regularly for clients who’ve launched something with us and want us to keep evolving it, or who need a reliable build partner on call without hiring full-time.

When hourly is the fair model

Sometimes the work genuinely can’t be scoped up front, and pretending otherwise would mean padding a fixed quote to cover the unknowns, which is worse for you, not better. Open-ended exploration, a research spike, “we’re not sure what this is yet, help us find out,” small ad-hoc tasks: for work like that, billing for the actual time spent is simply the fairer arrangement. When that’s the situation, we’ll say so and bill hourly, transparently.

The point isn’t that hourly is bad. It’s that hourly applied to a well-defined project aligns the wrong incentives, and a fixed price applied to genuinely open-ended work forces us to pad. Match the model to the work and both problems disappear.

How we decide, with you

On the first call, we’ll get a feel for which model fits, and we’ll tell you which one we’d recommend and why. Usually it’s obvious: a clear project gets a fixed price, ongoing work gets a retainer, genuinely exploratory work gets billed for the time it takes. What you won’t get from us is the same answer regardless of the question, or a number you can’t see the logic behind.

If you’ve got something in mind and aren’t sure how it’d be priced, tell us about it and we’ll walk you through it.