The uncomfortable truth of agency pricing is that the moment you are best able to price a project accurately is the moment after it has finished.
Why fixed fees distort the work
A fixed fee agreed before discovery makes discovery adversarial. Every genuine finding becomes a threat to margin, so the incentive is to discover as little as possible and build what was written down.
That is precisely backwards. Discovery is where the value is, and it is the phase most likely to change the plan.
Price the phase, not the project
We sell discovery as its own engagement with its own fee and its own deliverable. It ends with a scoped, priced proposal for the build — and with the client free to take that proposal elsewhere.
A discovery phase a client can walk away from is the only kind worth buying.
- Discovery: fixed fee, two to four weeks, ends in a scoped proposal
- Build: fixed fee, because by now it is genuinely scopeable
- Care: monthly retainer, cancellable, no minimum term
Where it still goes wrong
Two ways, reliably. Discovery uncovers something so large that the build proposal exceeds the client’s budget — better to learn in week three than month six, but it still stings on both sides.
And occasionally a client wants the confidence of a total number on day one and will not proceed without it. We have learned to say no to those, which took longer than it should have.