We price outputs, not hours. And deliver in a fraction of the time.
After we hand off your project, ordinary new requests are priced on the work itself — not on the time we spend producing it. We assess the fair market value of the deliverable, quote 20% below it, and ship fast. Written. Fixed. No timesheets.
One model. No tiers. No monthly fees. No hourly tracking. You pay for what gets shipped — with scope, discount, and delivery date written before work starts.
Traditional consulting sells hours. We produce in days what used to take months — at a fraction of the cost. Charging for time would punish you for the speed of delivery and reward us for dragging work out. So we stopped. Output is the unit. Output is the price. Speed is the default.
From approved quote to shipped deliverable for most post-handoff requests. Industry benchmark for the same scope is 5 – 8 weeks. We deliver in a fraction of the time.
Every ordinary output quote comes in 20% below the benchmarked fair market value for the same deliverable. Written before work starts, no haggling.
No retainer. No standing cost. If you send us nothing, you pay nothing. The relationship lives request-by-request.
The model, plainly
Every ordinary engagement after handoff runs through the same four steps. Complex, regulated, emergency, or third-party-dependent work gets scoped before the quote clock starts.
You submit a request.
Anything from a small bug fix to a full new feature, an integration, a redesign, a migration. Email, Slack, shared doc — however you want to write it up. Scope as loose or tight as you need; we help you sharpen it if it's loose.
We assess fair market value.
We benchmark what the deliverable would cost from a competent mid-to-senior agency or experienced contractor. Sources cited. Methodology shown. You receive a written fair-market-value breakdown, not a handwave.
We quote 20% below that number.
Fixed price. Fixed timeline. Written quote within 48 hours for ordinary scoped requests. If the market says the deliverable is worth $25,000, our quote is $20,000. No change orders unless the scope changes, no hourly creep, no surprise on the invoice.
You approve. We deliver.
Shipped at the quoted price by the quoted date. Post-ship verification plus one round of iteration included. Done. The invoice matches the quote to the penny.
A worked example
Real numbers for a realistic request so the model isn't abstract.
Hypothetical request
"Add a Stripe-connected subscription billing flow to our live product — checkout, customer portal, webhooks, dunning emails, admin dashboard. Must launch before our Q3 pricing page goes live."
| Competent agency quote (typical range) | $22,000 – $32,000 |
| Senior freelance contractor quote (typical range) | $16,000 – $24,000 |
| Fair market value, midpoint | $24,000 |
| Industry timeline for same scope | 6 – 8 weeks |
| Fair market value (what you'd pay elsewhere) | $24,000 |
| Your price from us (20% below FMV) | $19,200 |
| Your delivery from us | 5 – 7 days |
The promise: if you receive a legitimate quote from another vendor that comes in below our post-discount price and matches our delivery timeline for the same scope and quality bar, send it before approval. We either match it, reset the scope, or pass on the work. You don't have to negotiate through ambiguity.
How we assess fair market value
The fair market number is the number you could realistically pay elsewhere to get the same deliverable, at the same quality, in the same timeframe. We pull from three public data streams every time:
- Published agency rate cards for the same deliverable class — what Thoughtbot, Nearform, Tuple, or similar boutiques would quote for equivalent scope.
- Senior freelance marketplaces — Toptal, Arc, Gun.io, and top-tier Upwork rates for experienced contractors with matching skill sets.
- Historical quotes for your scope class, redacted and anonymized, that we've personally seen cross the table in the last 18 months.
Every quote you receive ships with the three reference numbers and their sources. You can verify our FMV assessment in under ten minutes by calling one of those agencies yourself. If you disagree with the number, you counter-source, and we adjust. This isn't opaque pricing — it's the opposite.
What every engagement includes
Every quote includes
- Written FMV breakdown with three cited comparables
- Fixed price — no hourly creep, no change orders unless scope changes
- Fixed delivery date — with any miss remedy written into the quote
- Post-ship verification plus one round of iteration
- Slack or email access for questions during the work
- All client-specific source code, assets, and handoff credentials included in the quote
Not included
- No monthly standing fee between requests
- No ongoing retainer, no hour pool, no timesheets
- No 3am incident coverage without a separate incident agreement
- No cost for quick questions in Slack — those stay free
- No price surprises — the invoice matches the quote exactly
Why 20% · and why the speed
Because the partnership is the product. We'd rather keep you as a client for five years than extract one extra month of margin. If ordinary requests beat the market by a real 20% and ship quickly, you have no reason to shop elsewhere — and we have no reason to spend time selling against other vendors. The math is simpler, the trust is faster, and the work stays with the team that shipped the original build.
It also forces discipline on our side. We can only discount 20% from fair market and still deliver in days instead of weeks by being genuinely better at the work — sharper tooling, tighter scoping, faster iteration, better defaults. The pricing and speed commitments are what keep us raising our own bar.
How to send us a request
Write the request. Send it. Get a quote in 48 hours.
Email, Slack, or a shared doc. Describe what you want shipped — in whatever detail is easy for you, loose or tight. For ordinary scoped requests, within two business days we send back a written quote with the fair-market breakdown, the discounted price, and the delivery date. You approve, we ship. The whole cycle is meant to be fast enough that the pricing conversation never becomes the bottleneck.
Prefer to talk it through first? A 20-minute call before you write the request often sharpens the scope and lets us give you a verbal FMV ballpark on the spot. No commitment required. No sales pressure — just help naming the thing you want built.