Why we publish our prices
Almost every development agency hides its prices behind a form. We publish ours on the site, per sprint, with the add-ons listed separately. It costs us deals. We keep doing it, and this is the reasoning.
The standard defence of hidden pricing is that every project is different. That is true and it is not the reason. The reason is that a quote produced after a discovery call can be shaped by what the discovery call revealed about your budget, and no agency wants to give that up.
I want to be careful here, because this is an argument about our own commercial model and it would be easy to make it sound more principled than it is. Publishing prices is partly a positioning decision. It is also a decision we would find harder to make if our costs were less predictable than they are.
What "contact us for a quote" is actually for
A hidden price does one useful thing for the seller: it moves price discovery to a point where the seller knows more about the buyer than the buyer knows about the seller. By the time a number appears, you have described your funding stage, your timeline and your internal team. All three are inputs to the number.
The mechanics are simple enough to describe. Two companies ask for the same piece of work. One mentions a recent Series A; the other mentions that they are pre-revenue and watching every pound. The scope is identical. The proposals are not. Nothing improper has occurred, and both will be defended internally as reflecting the value delivered.
I am not accusing anyone of bad faith. Value-based pricing is a legitimate model and the people who practise it will tell you so openly. But it means two companies buying the same work pay different amounts, and the difference is not explained by the work.
It also imposes a real cost on you. Evaluating four agencies properly means four intro calls, four discovery sessions and four proposals, which is roughly three weeks of your calendar spent extracting numbers that could have been on a page. Most founders do not have three weeks, so they evaluate two and pick from a sample too small to be meaningful.
What publishing costs us
We lose people at the pricing page who would have taken a call. Some of them had more budget than they thought and would have found the number reasonable after understanding what sits behind it. A published price gets judged in isolation, against nothing, by someone who has not yet learned that it covers a team rather than a contractor.
There is an anchoring problem too. A number read cold, before any context, gets compared against whatever the reader last paid for something loosely similar, which is often a single freelancer. We can explain on the pricing page that a sprint covers an engineer, a lead who scopes and reviews, and QA at release. We cannot make anyone read it.
We also give up upside. When a well-funded company with an urgent deadline arrives, the sprint costs what the sprint costs. That is money left on the table, measurably, and I am aware of it every time it happens.
And competitors can read the page. Some price against us, which is fine, and some quote just underneath us on the first call, which is less fine but entirely predictable. The alternative is asking clients to accept an information disadvantage so we can keep one over other agencies, and that is not a trade I am willing to ask a client to make on our behalf.
The deals we lose to a published price are mostly deals that would have ended badly at a quote three weeks later.
What it buys
The scoping call stops being a sales call. Nobody is establishing budget or managing an expectation, because the number was settled before the call was booked. We spend thirty minutes on the actual work, which is the only part either side is qualified to judge.
It changes who books. The people who arrive have already decided the number is workable, so the conversation starts at whether the work is right rather than whether it is affordable. Our call-to-engagement rate is far higher than it was when we quoted, on a smaller number of calls, and the smaller number is the improvement rather than the cost.
The sales cycle shortens to the length of one call plus a decision. There is no proposal document, no pricing meeting, no revised proposal. And the awkward conversation where a client discovers the number is out of range now happens on a web page at no cost to anybody.
Internally it enforces a discipline we would otherwise lose. Nobody can quietly discount to win a deal, because the price is public and the next client will see what the last one paid. That removes a whole category of end-of-quarter decision-making, and it means the answer to "can you do better on price" is the same answer every time, which is easier for everyone than it sounds.
"But every project is different"
Every project is different in scope. Almost none are different in rate. A week of a senior engineer's time costs us the same whoever bought it, so the honest structure is a fixed price per sprint and a conversation about how many sprints the work needs. The variable is the count, not the number.
That reframing is what makes publishing possible. We are not claiming to know what your project costs. We are telling you what a week costs, which we do know, and which you can multiply.
Where scope genuinely varies, the variation shows up as a count of sprints rather than a change in rate, and we say on the call how confident we are in the count. A well-understood integration might be one sprint with high confidence. A migration off an undocumented legacy system might be two to five, and we will say two to five rather than picking three because it sounds decisive.
What we cannot publish
How many sprints your build needs. Anyone who quotes that from a form is guessing, and the guess will be wrong in the direction that wins the deal. We give a range on the call after looking at the code, and we say plainly when the range is wide.
When the range is wide, the honest recommendation is usually to buy one sprint and re-estimate afterwards, because a week of real work collapses the uncertainty faster than any amount of further analysis. That is a smaller first commitment than most agencies want, and it is the one that leaves you with the most information per pound spent.
We also cannot publish a price for work that is not a sprint. Long-term managed retainers, unusual compliance requirements and anything involving hardware get quoted, because the sprint model does not describe them honestly.
