Why we flat-rate everything we productize
Hourly billing makes sense for discovery and aligns nobody for delivery. Here's how we think about fixed pricing, and where it breaks.
We've never billed hourly for a production build. Our rate card looks like a menu: voice agent $3,500, internal assistant $7,500, custom CRM starting at $15,000. Clients know the number before they sign.
The alignment problem with hourly billing is simple: the best outcome for the shop is more hours; the best outcome for the client is fewer. The relationship drifts from 'build me what I need' to 'don't exceed your budget.' Both parties start measuring the wrong thing.
Flat rate fixes the incentive. We ship the scope or we eat the cost. Our job is to make the scope ship well, and we have every incentive to scope it well up front.
Three things have to be true for flat rate to work.
One: the scope has to be real. Vague scopes die in flat-rate models — the client's imagination expands to fill the price, the studio's ability to deliver compresses, and both sides end up unhappy. Our scope docs are specific to the point of anal. What ships. What doesn't. What counts as 'done.'
Two: the studio has to have shipped the thing before. Flat-rate pricing on a novel build is gambling. Our productized systems are productized precisely because we've shipped enough of them to know the edge cases. A voice agent takes 14 days because we've shipped 12 voice agents and the 13th one has no surprises left.
Three: the change-request mechanism has to be clear. Scope changes cost extra. We quote them separately, in writing, before we touch the code. Clients know what a change costs before they request it. Nobody is surprised.
Flat rate breaks when the project is too novel to scope cleanly — usually custom platforms, marketplaces, or anything involving a new regulatory regime. For those, we still fix the scope, but we quote in phases. Discovery is flat. Architecture is flat. Build is flat per phase. Each phase ends with a sign-off that locks the next phase's scope.
The client never sees an hourly invoice. The studio never gets stuck eating unquoted time. The work compounds because both sides are measuring the same thing: did the scope ship, on time, at price.