Pricing is the question every client asks first and most studios answer last. We'd rather be clear up front, so here's how we price design and build work, and why it changed.
Why we stopped quoting by the screen
For years we priced projects by counting screens. It felt fair and it was easy to explain. It was also wrong. A settings page and a checkout flow are both "one screen", and they are nowhere near the same amount of work.
Worse, it rewarded everyone for adding screens, which is the opposite of what a good product needs. The best decision in most projects is a screen that never gets built.
Screen counts also hid the work that matters most on a real product: the integrations, the edge cases, the migration from the old system, the hour spent with support staff learning what customers actually ask.
How we price now
Today we price by engagement, and each engagement has a clear shape:
- Product sprint (2–4 weeks): research, flows and a tested prototype, at a fixed price
- MVP build (around 7 weeks): design and production code for a first release, fixed price for a fixed scope
- Dedicated squad: a cross-functional crew for ongoing work, billed monthly
- Support & scale: a monthly retainer for maintenance, improvements and on-call
Fixed prices come from a scope we write together in the first workshop. The guide prices on our services pages are real starting points, not bait, and we'll tell you on the first call whether your budget fits.
Each engagement can lead into the next, but none of them assumes it. A sprint ends with a prototype you own and a plan you could hand to any team, including your own.
What's fixed and what isn't
The scope can change every Friday. The price only changes when both of us agree to a trade.
Products change as you learn, and we don't want a contract to stop that. So the scope is a list of outcomes, not a list of screens. When something new comes up in a Friday demo, we swap it for something of a similar size, or we agree to add a week. There are no surprise invoices at the end.
Every proposal spells out the same four things:
- What we'll deliver, written as outcomes
- What we're deliberately leaving out
- Who from your side needs to be available, and when
- The price, the payment schedule and what happens if the scope changes
Alongside the Friday demo we send a short note showing the budget used so far against the plan. If we're drifting, you hear it from us on a Friday, not from an invoice at the end of the month.
When we say no
Sometimes the honest answer is that we're not the right fit: the budget is too small for the scope, the deadline was fixed before the problem was understood, or the project is really a staffing need. We'd rather say so on the first call, and point you to someone better suited, than take on work we can't do well.
Saying no early has a side effect we like: the projects we do take on start with both sides knowing exactly why we're a good fit.
The short version
We price by outcome, not by screen: a fixed price for a fixed scope, a monthly fee for ongoing crews, and a trade rather than a surprise when things change. If anything in one of our proposals isn't clear, we haven't finished writing it.