Pricing
Most agencies hide price behind a discovery call. It wastes your time and ours. Here is what things cost and why they are structured this way.
Audit / build / optional ongoingfixed, two weeks
Credited in full against the build if you go ahead, so it costs nothing extra if we work together. If the honest answer is not yet, you still keep the document.
typical, fixed per project
Because two weeks were already spent inside the business, the quote is a real number with a real scope attached. You are buying the outcome, not the hours.
per month, optional
Monitoring, iteration and new workflows on top of a system that already works. Month to month. If it stops earning its place, cancel it.
The first conversation is free and takes twenty minutes. If the audit is not the right next step we will say so on that call.
A free audit is a sales document. It has to end in a recommendation to buy, because that is the only way it pays for itself. A paid audit can end in "not yet" without costing us anything, which is the only way the advice is worth reading. Roughly a third of them do.
Then skip the audit and describe it. If the scope is genuinely clear we will quote the build directly. The audit exists for the far more common case where the goal is clear and the path is not.
Hourly billing pays us for being slow and punishes us for being fast. Fixed price against a written scope means you are buying an outcome. If it takes longer than expected, that is our problem.
A retainer on top of a system we did not build is a support contract for someone else code. We would be guessing, and you would be paying for the guessing. Build first, then keep it running.
It comes with you. Everything is built on infrastructure you own, and the export path is documented before the project starts, not after you ask for it.