Go looking for the price of custom software and you will almost always find a form instead. Contact us. Book a call. Request a quote. The number exists, but it arrives late, in a document, after several meetings, and only once the firm has learned enough about you to guess what you will tolerate.
We do it the other way. Every engagement we sell has a price on the site. The Service Configurator is $9,650 for the core build and up to $27,650 fully loaded, configured and bought in the browser without a meeting. Product Feasibility starts at $3,500. Enterprise builds start at $25,000. The growth loop program is $5,000 a month, flat. All of it is readable at the store before you tell us your name.
Here is the reasoning, including the part that costs us.
What the proposal cycle actually costs
A quote is not free to produce. Discovery calls, a scoping workshop, a written document, internal review, a revision after the client pushes back. None of it is billed. The firm absorbs it, and firms do not absorb costs, they price them in. Every client who signs is quietly paying for the proposals that went nowhere.
The buyer pays too, in the currency that matters most at the start of a project. Weeks spent explaining the same problem to three vendors, only to receive three documents describing different scopes at different depths, which cannot honestly be compared. The comparison the cycle exists to enable is the thing it prevents.
The document itself is not a neutral estimate either. It is a sales artifact, written to be accepted.
What the clock rewards
Hourly billing pays for hours. Under a rate card, finishing early is a revenue loss. Reusing something you already built is a revenue loss. Telling a client that a requested feature is not worth building is a revenue loss.
This is not an accusation of fraud. The failure is slower than that. It is drift. The estimate becomes a range. The range becomes a floor. Scope grows because nothing in the arrangement pushes back on it, and the client carries all of the estimation risk while the firm carries none. A rate card is a promise about inputs, and nobody buys software because they wanted inputs.
What a fixed number forces us to get good at
You cannot publish $9,650 unless you know what the work costs you. Publishing forces that knowledge into existence, and drags other disciplines with it.
- Written scope. A fixed price is only honest if both sides know where it stops. So we write down what is included, what is excluded, and what each addition costs. Payments, custom integrations, extra pages, brand system, SEO setup, priority delivery and care plans are separately priced, in public. "We will figure that out later" is where fixed prices go to die.
- Reusable engineering. When speed is our margin instead of our loss, infrastructure we can use again becomes an asset.
- Settling the architecture first. On software carrying real users, real money and real data, the expensive mistakes are structural. Fixed price makes rework our cost, which is a strong reason to decide the shape before anyone writes feature code.
- Saying no. Some work does not fit a fixed shape. Under a rate card you take it anyway. We have to decline it, or restructure it into something we can price without lying.
- Being honest about uncertainty. The right response to a genuinely unknown build is not a confident number. It is a fixed-scope investigation that produces one: market reality, technical risk priced by a working spike, a three-band cost envelope, and a build or do-not-build recommendation with the reasoning shown.
What it costs us
This is the part firms leave out. We lose deals to optimism. A published number gets compared against an estimate from someone who has not yet discovered what the job takes, and next to an optimistic estimate we look expensive. That estimate usually moves later. We are not in the room when it does.
We absorb our own misjudgments. Fixed price means the variance is our problem, and some engagements end up worth less than they looked when we scoped them. That is the deal, and it is why the price is worth anything.
We lose conversations at the floor. "From $25,000" is a floor, not a teaser, and some buyers are below it. They learn that in ten seconds instead of after three calls. That costs us a pipeline, and saves everyone the calls.
And we give up flexibility. A public price is hard to move quietly, and we cannot charge one buyer more because they look able to pay more. That is the point. It is still a cost, and we would rather name it than pretend the model is free.
Who this is not for
If you want a negotiation, a discount ladder, or a vendor who will keep the meter running until the requirements settle, we are the wrong firm, and you know that today rather than in month four.
If you want to know what something costs before spending a week explaining it, the numbers are on the store, next to the work. If you would rather talk first, write to us or book a time.