Pricing: blitz, fixed bid, fractional

Most studios make you sit through two calls to find out whether you can afford them. Here it is.

It starts with one week: a blitz from one senior expert. It buys more than you might think. Six ways to buy it — three for a piece of work, three for the long run.

One-off work. Pay for a defined project, a week at a time, or a month at once.

Fixed bid

Onenumber

Discovery first · then one number

A figure we hold

A defined project, scoped with you, quoted once and held. Available after the question week, not before it.

Once we understand what is actually being built, we put a single number on it and stand behind it. Scope and figure are agreed together; change the scope later and we requote, openly, before anything moves.

It is the only way we will give you a total. A figure offered before the work is understood is a guess wearing a quote’s clothing.

Where the build is technically deep or the need runs long, the bid carries an upfront discovery fee. Pricing a complex system is itself work, and it is the work the bid depends on being right — we would rather charge for it than pad the quote to cover our own guessing.

You get:

One figure, agreed up front
Paid discovery on deep or long builds
Scope agreed together, alongside it
Requoted openly if scope moves
Everything we make is yours

Week rate

$5k/ week

One senior expert · 40–60 hours

A week of us

One senior-level expert, working inside your team, planned ahead and scheduled. Billed by the week, never by the hour.

Wondering what a week gets you? Ten ideas

A fixed price for one senior-level expert’s week. The range is the point: forty hours when that is what the job takes, sixty when it needs the push — same price either way, and no overage. Room to flex and actually finish, instead of stopping at a number.

You get the plan before the week starts — a schedule of activities, agreed up front, so on Monday you already know what Thursday produces.

Best used as extra muscle to get something over the finish line, or for the small awkward job nobody internally wants to pick up. One flat price makes it easy for you and for us.

You get:

One senior-level expert, dedicated to the week
A plan and schedule, agreed with you before Monday
No hourly billing, no overage
Week on, week off, as the roadmap moves
Everything we make is yours

Month rate

−25%

Four weeks · bought together

A month, bought at once

Four weeks together takes twenty-five percent off. The best block on this page.

Four weeks at five thousand is twenty thousand. Bought together it is fifteen.

A block you buy once and draw down against — useful when you know there is a month of work but not exactly how it splits.

Need it standing rather than one-off? That is the retainer, and it goes further.

You get:

Four weeks: 25% off
One block, drawn down
Same fixed-price weeks inside it
No hourly billing, no overage
Everything we make is yours

Retainer

Scaled∞

Days, monthly · by commitment

The longer it runs, the cheaper it gets

A standing block of days every month, priced down as the commitment grows. Economy of scale, in our favour and yours.

Bulk is a block you buy once. A retainer is us on your roster: a standing number of days each month, first call on the calendar, and a rate that keeps falling the longer it runs.

Scale the days up when something ships and down when it does not. The term is the only thing that has to hold — the longer you commit, the lower the number, and the earlier you book the year, the earlier it starts falling.

The longest one we have run went twelve years. That is not a sales line, it is on the Proof page.

You get:

Us on your roster, not in your inbox
A standing block of days each month
Rate falls as the term grows
Scale up and down inside it
First call on our calendar

Fractional

Oneseat

Part of every week · billed monthly

The seat you have not filled yet

Design director. Head of product. A senior person in the chair for part of every week — without the salary, the title and the eighteen months.

A retainer buys days. Fractional buys a person with a job: the one who decides what the thing is before anyone builds it, sits in your standups, owns the roadmap and the hiring, and answers to your leadership like anyone else on the team.

Priced as a share of a week and billed monthly. Most of ours sit alongside a retainer, so the person who set the direction is also the one who has the days to carry it.

When you make the full-time hire, we help you make it — and hand over properly. The seat was always yours.

You get:

A named senior person, part-time
In your meetings, on your org chart
Owns a function, not a ticket
A share of a week, billed monthly
A handoff when you hire

Equity · for startups

Bench+10

Our cost, plus ten · plus a stake

Dollars, traded for skin in the game

A discounted hourly rate — our cost plus ten percent for overhead, no margin — and a position alongside you instead.

We do not make money on the cash here. The upside is the stake, and being invested changes how the work gets made: longer-horizon decisions, fewer shortcuts, nobody optimising for the end of the statement of work.

Not on a menu and not offered often. We have to believe in it, and you have to be building something where our being in it moves the odds. The size of the stake is agreed per engagement, in writing, before anyone starts.

Ask at the start. This is a conversation for the beginning, not a discount to negotiate at the end.

You get:

Hourly at our cost, plus 10%
Not a penny of margin
A partner with a position, not a vendor
Stake agreed in writing, up front
A conversation for the start, not the end

With every engagement

The first five hours are on us.

Five real hours, not a sales call with a deck at the end of it. They come with a signed engagement on any of the six above, and are credited against your first invoice. They are not a free consultation to book on their own.

What you actually needWhich is frequently not the thing in the brief.
What the requirements areIncluding the ones nobody has written down yet.
When you need itAnd the real deadline behind the stated one.
Anything else in the wayBudget, politics, the system nobody is allowed to touch.

Start an engagement

Five thousand, concretely

What comes out of one week.

Not a status report and not a research phase. Real things, made with your team, finished enough to show someone who was not in the room. Any one of these is a week.

A clickable prototype straw-manThe idea, built enough to click through and argue with. Wrong in public on day five beats right on paper in month three.
A pitch deck with your brand on itWe shape the story with you and design the deck around it, using the brand and screens you already have and roughing in what you do not. The version you can put in front of an investor without apologising for the template.
A high-level UX framework for that thing that has no shapeThe key screens or functions, and the structure everything else hangs off: navigation model, core flows, the states nobody enjoys drawing.
A design system starterType scale, colour, spacing and the first dozen components, handed over as something your engineers can build against.
A product audit with the three real blockersNot forty findings in a spreadsheet. The three things actually costing you conversion, ranked, with what we would do about each.
One critical flow, mapped end to endOnboarding, checkout, activation — whichever one is leaking. Journey, service blueprint and the redesign.
A quick brand and a lite brand kitA mark, type and colour, applied to real surfaces and packaged so your team can use it on Monday. Two or three routes first, if you would rather choose than trust us.
A first pass of high-fidelity UIThe key screens, drawn properly, in your brand and in the states people actually hit. Enough to react to, hand to engineers or put in front of a customer.
A five-page websiteDesigned, written with you and built, for the company that needs to exist online by the end of the month and not the end of the quarter.
An honest read on your AI featureWhether it belongs in the product at all, what it does when it is wrong, and how you would know it works. Our position →

Not sure which of these you need? That is what the first week is for, and it is the same five thousand.

The honest part

We can tell you the rate. We cannot tell you the total.

Those are different questions, and the difference is the whole reason this page has numbers on it and no estimates.

The rate is knowable on day one

It is five thousand a week. It was five thousand a week before you called and it will be the same next Tuesday. Nobody needs a discovery call to learn it, which is why it is printed here rather than withheld as leverage.

The total is not, and nobody else’s is either

How many weeks depends on what the problem turns out to be, and we do not know that in the first meeting. Neither does the studio that gives you a confident figure in theirs. That number is a sales instrument, not an estimate. Why we won’t quote one →

So we scope after the first week

The question week is short, it is cheap, and it is the point at which a number stops being a guess. You can stop there if the answer is not what you hoped. People have.

What actually moves the number

The rate is fixed. The multiplier is up to you.

None of this is a surcharge and none of it is on an invoice. Rules of thumb for where the weeks go.

Bar length = cost of the week

×1Deciding something in week two
×20Deciding the same thing in week nine
×1.5A second decider with a veto who has not attended a review
×2“Make it pop” in place of a reason — compounding, each round
×1.8A spec nobody is permitted to question
×0.6Giving us the constraint you have not written down yet
FreeUs telling you the idea is good
FreeUs telling you it isn’t. That is the one worth having.

The twenty is not a joke and it is the only figure on this page we would defend in a deposition. A decision deferred past the point where the thing is built is not a decision, it is a rebuild. Working with creatives →

Including, sometimes, none of them. If a week of us is not the right spend, we would rather say so now than invoice you for finding out.

Start the conversation

The part nobody puts on their website.

A figure we hold

A week of us

A month, bought at once

The longer it runs, the cheaper it gets

The seat you have not filled yet

Dollars, traded for skin in the game

The first five hours are on us.

What comes out of one week.

We can tell you the rate. We cannot tell you the total.

The rate is knowable on day one

The total is not, and nobody else’s is either

So we scope after the first week

The rate is fixed. The multiplier is up to you.

Tell us what you’re building and we’ll work out together which one fits.