What “fixed-fee” actually means for a web project

Most studios bill by the hour. We do not — every engagement is a fixed fee against a written scope. People sometimes hear that as “cheaper,” but that is not what it is. It is a different way of agreeing what you are buying.

Hourly moves the risk onto you

When you pay by the hour, you carry the risk of every estimate being wrong. If the work takes longer — because the brief shifted, or the team was slow — you pay for it. The incentives quietly point the wrong way: the longer it takes, the more it bills.

Fixed-fee flips that. We carry the estimation risk. If the work runs long inside the agreed scope, that is our problem, not your invoice.

The scope is the contract

A fixed fee is only as good as the scope behind it. So before we name a price, we run discovery and write down what is included, what is not, and the date each milestone is due. You approve that in writing before the work starts.

That document is the point. It is what lets us quote a fixed number without padding it for safety, and it is what protects you from the “that’s out of scope” conversation halfway through. If something genuinely new comes up, we scope it as its own line — visibly, not as a surprise.

Dated milestones, not open-ended sprints

Fixed-fee without dates is just a number. We attach milestones to a calendar: discovery, design, build, launch. You can see how we work in stages, and each stage has a date attached. A fixed fee plus dated milestones means you always know the two things agencies most often keep vague: what it costs, and when it ships.

Where fixed-fee does not fit

It is not magic. Fixed-fee works when the outcome can be described before the work starts — a landing page, a business site, a defined first release of a product. It works less well for genuinely open-ended research, where nobody can scope the destination yet. In those cases we say so, and propose a small paid discovery to define the real scope first.

After launch

Fixed-fee covers the project. Keeping a site fast and patched afterwards is a different shape of work, so it is a separate, predictable plan — our care and maintenance runs at a fixed monthly fee rather than ad-hoc hours.

The whole model comes down to one idea: you should know the price and the date before you commit, and the scope that makes both real should be in writing. If that is how you would rather work, send us the brief.