What it is
After a 30-minute scoping call, the provider sends a single number and a written scope. You accept or reject. If accepted, you pay the number — no matter how many hours it takes. If the scope changes mid-build, that's a new quote.
The alternative is hourly billing: $150–$300/hour, billed against a time tracker, with the provider deciding how many hours each item takes.
Why flat-price aligns incentives
Hourly billing punishes provider efficiency. Every hour saved by using AI tooling, by skipping unnecessary discovery, by writing better tests upfront — is an hour not billed. The provider has zero financial reason to ship faster.
Flat-price flips this. The provider wants to ship fast because the price is the price either way. They want clean specs because scope creep is their cost. They want to use modern AI tooling because it compresses the build.
When flat-price doesn't work
When the spec genuinely is in flux. Discovery-heavy projects ("we don't know what we're building yet") can't be flat-quoted because there's no scope to quote against. For those, an hourly arrangement or a paid scoping engagement makes sense.
Same for: ongoing maintenance with unpredictable load, on-call rotations, anything where the work is reactive rather than scoped.
Red flags around flat-price quotes
- Quote that's vague about scope ("we'll build the MVP" — what specifically?)
- Quote with no written first-deploy date
- "Flat for the MVP, then hourly for everything after"
- Heavy discovery phase billed separately at hourly rates before any code
What we charge
Our current sheet: $2.5K to $25K across five tiers. No hourly options.
