Why Everything We Sell Has a Fixed Price

The dominant pricing model in consulting is the day rate, and it has a defect that no amount of goodwill can fix: it rewards slowness. Every overrun, every meandering meeting, every "it turned out to be more complicated than we thought" is billed to the client. The supplier carries none of the risk and all of the incentive to let scope drift.

We price the other way round. Everything we sell has a fixed price, agreed in writing, before work starts.

How it works in practice

Before a project begins, we produce a signed statement of work: the scope, the price and — crucially — the acceptance criteria. Not vague promises, but concrete statements of what the finished thing must do, testable against your real cases.

Payment then follows the work, on a 40 / 30 / 30 structure:

• 40% on signature — the scope, price and acceptance criteria are fixed and the project is scheduled.
• 30% at the build milestone — released when we demonstrate the agreed milestone working against your real cases, not a canned demo.
• 30% on written acceptance — paid when you have confirmed, in writing, that the acceptance criteria are met. Documentation, credentials and a 30-day defect warranty come with handover.

And a clause we consider non-negotiable: you can stop at any milestone boundary. You pay for work completed and accepted — never for the rest of a project you no longer want.

"But what if the scope was wrong?"

Then that is our problem more than yours, and that is the point. Fixed pricing only works if the scoping is done properly, which is why we invest real effort before signature and why our catalogue is deliberately narrow. We know what these projects involve because we build the same three things repeatedly. The risk sits with the party best placed to manage it — the builder.

What this does to the relationship

Something subtle and valuable: it aligns the incentives. Under a day rate, the supplier profits when things take longer. Under a fixed price with acceptance criteria, we profit only by building the right thing efficiently and getting it accepted. Clarity pays; drift costs — us, not you.

It also means you can plan. A voice agent, a website or a training programme becomes a capital decision with a known cost and a defined return, not an open-ended subscription to someone else's time.

Nothing is invoiced before it is agreed in writing. It is a simple sentence, but we have found it changes everything that follows.