How to get a fixed price for software work

Getting a price for software work is usually harder than it should be. You fill in a contact form, wait two days, get offered a discovery call, spend forty minutes explaining your business to a salesperson, and receive a proposal a week later with a number in it and no working shown.

You wanted to know what a thing costs. You now know what a fortnight of your attention costs.

There is a simpler way to do it, and this is how ours works, including the parts that are slower than the marketing would like.

What you need before you ask#

Not much, and none of it technical.

One or two sentences describing what you want. Written the way you would explain it to a colleague, not the way you imagine a developer wants to hear it. "The checkout sometimes fails on mobile and we want to add a discount code box" is a perfect brief. You do not need to know whether that is a front-end problem.

Some idea of what the software is. Not the stack, just the thing: a WordPress site, an app we built in 2019, a spreadsheet the whole office runs on. If you do not know, that is genuinely fine and worth saying.

Whether you have the code. Many people do not, or do not know. It changes what happens first, but it does not stop anything, and not having it is normal rather than a failure.

What happens after you send it#

A person reads it. Not an algorithm. Somebody who has built software for thirty years reads what you wrote and works out what the job actually is, which frequently means noticing the bits you did not mention because you did not know they mattered.

It gets sized. Every job is graded into a number of tokens, which is how the work is priced. A small change is a handful; a substantial feature is more. The point of the unit is that the same job costs the same whether it takes us a good day or a bad one.

You get a price and a description. The description matters as much as the number: it says what we understood you to be asking for, so if we have it wrong you can say so before anything happens.

You approve, or you do not. Approving is what pays for it and what starts the work. Not approving costs nothing and nobody rings you about it.

How long it takes#

The form takes about a minute. The pricing does not come back in a minute, and anybody promising that is either guessing or has an algorithm doing the guessing for them.

Grading is done by hand, so expect a reply in hours rather than days for a straightforward job. If the work needs somebody to read your code first, we will say that, and reading the code is usually a small priced job of its own so you know what you have before you spend anything serious.

What you are not agreeing to#

Worth stating plainly, because most people asking have been stung before.

• No contract. There is nothing to sign and nothing to give notice on.
• No retainer and no minimum. You can buy one job and never come back.
• No auto-renewal. Nothing recurs, because there is nothing to recur.
• No obligation from asking. A price is a price, not a commitment.
• You own the code. Your repository, your hosting, your accounts, in your name.

What makes a price come back faster#

Three things, in order.

Say what "done" looks like. "Add a discount code field" is clear. "Improve the checkout" needs a conversation first, which is fine, but it is a different first step.

Mention the deadline if there is one. Real dates change how work is scheduled and priced. Invented urgency helps nobody.

Say if something is already broken. A bug affecting live customers is treated differently from an improvement, and we would rather know at the start.

The part that needs us#

You can describe the problem. What you cannot easily do is work out what fixing it touches, and that is the difference between a price you can trust and an estimate that grows.

If you want a number for something specific, tell us what you need. It takes about a minute, there is no call, and you will get a fixed price back with a plain description of what we think you are asking for.

If you are not ready for a price yet#

Perfectly reasonable. If you are still working out what you want, say that when you get in touch: shaping a vague idea into something buildable is itself a piece of work, and it is a much better first step than paying somebody to build the wrong thing quickly.

The rates are published on the one-off jobs and ongoing work pages, so you can see what a job costs before you speak to anyone. And if it turns out you do not need a developer for this at all, we will tell you.