What moves the number
We do not publish a price list for services, and the reason is not coyness. A price list for custom work is either so wide it tells you nothing or so narrow it is wrong for most of the people reading it. What we can publish is the mechanism: the things that genuinely change what a project costs. If you recognise several of these in your own situation, you already know roughly where you sit.
- Scope — not how many screens, but how many distinct user roles and permissions, which multiply faster than screens do
- Integrations with systems we do not control, especially any without a documented interface
- Data migration, where the condition of the existing data dominates everything else
- Compliance and data-residency obligations, which change the design rather than adding a document
- Content, which is usually the critical path on a website and almost never budgeted as such
- Whether you want us to operate it afterwards or hand it to your own team
What you get before you commit
Discovery is a real piece of work and it produces a real document. You get a written scope describing what is being built and what is explicitly not, a fixed price, and a date. We do not start until you have read it and agreed to it. For larger projects discovery is chargeable; for smaller ones it is usually part of the conversation.
- A written scope, including an explicit list of what is out of it
- A fixed price, not a range and not an hourly estimate that drifts
- A delivery date, with the things that would move it named
- The assumptions we made, so you can correct the ones that are wrong
When you know the number
Before you spend anything on the build. For most projects the sequence is a conversation, then a short discovery, then a fixed quote — typically inside two weeks from first contact. If we cannot quote something honestly without investigating further, we will say that and scope the investigation separately rather than pad the estimate to cover our uncertainty.
- First conversation: is this something we should be doing at all
- Discovery: enough detail to price it without guessing
- Fixed quote and written scope, before any build work starts
- Where genuine unknowns remain, a separately priced investigation rather than padding
What is never in the number
There is no markup on anything we buy on your behalf. Advertising spend goes on your own accounts with your own billing, and we charge a flat management fee rather than a percentage — a marketing fee that grows with your spending is a conflict of interest wearing a retainer. The same principle already governs how this platform handles telephony and email costs, and it is the whole argument of our article on resold software fees.
- No percentage of advertising spend, ever — flat management fee only
- No markup on third-party services, licences or infrastructure bought for you
- No charge for access to your own accounts, data or code
- No exit fee, and no retainer you have to keep paying to stay online
What happens when the scope changes
It will. Requirements are discovered, not specified, and anyone who pretends otherwise is planning to have an argument with you later. A change gets priced as its own small piece of work with its own written agreement, and you decide whether it is worth it. What we do not do is absorb changes silently and then present a surprise, or refuse every change on the grounds that it was not in the original document.
- Changes are quoted separately and agreed before they are built
- You can decline any of them and still get what was originally scoped
- If we got an estimate wrong, that is ours to absorb, not yours
- If we think a change is a bad idea we will say so before pricing it
Tell us what you are trying to do
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.