Every quote we send is fixed price, against named milestones, with payment tied to those milestones. No hourly billing. No "discovery phase." No change orders except for scope changes the client asked for.
This isn't a marketing position — it's an operational one. It's also cost us money several times. Worth saying both out loud.
Why we do it
Fixed price forces us to scope. If we were billing by the hour, we'd be rewarded for a woolly brief. Fixed price forces us to sit down in week one and actually understand what we're being asked to build. That first week is the single highest-leverage work on any project.
It aligns us with the client. Hourly billing pays the agency to be slow and thorough. Fixed billing pays us to be fast and right. The second is what the client wanted in the first place.
It makes scope creep visible. A change to the scope is a change order, signed and priced. That's not a gotcha — it's a conversation where the cost of the new thing is on the table before anyone commits to it. Hourly billing hides that conversation.
When it's cost us
It's cost us when we've been wrong about scope. Three times, that we'll name:
- A legal client's document AI project where we didn't anticipate that the source documents were scanned, rotated, handwritten PDFs. We ate the OCR work.
- An e-commerce build where the client changed M-Pesa providers mid-project. We ate the re-integration.
- An NGO M&E tool where the data model on paper wasn't the data model in the field. We ate a redesign.
Each of those, we could have billed an extra 20–40 hours at hourly rates. We didn't, because the quote was fixed. Three times in seven years is survivable — and every one of them taught us something we now price in.
What it means for you
Two things, practically:
- The first week of any project with us is the most expensive week for us, because it's when we're pricing the risk of the rest of the work. That's where we're most careful. Expect more questions than you're used to.
- If we give you a fixed quote, we'll finish at that price unless you change the scope. That's the trade you get for the extra week of scoping up front.
Fixed price isn't right for every agency. It's right for us because it matches the work we want to do.