An hourly invoice tells you how long, not whether
An hourly invoice tells you how long the work took. It does not tell you whether the work is done, whether it was the right work, or what next month's invoice will be. If you sign off on budgets, that is the wrong information. You can approve a number you understand. You cannot approve "it depends."
Most firms that build software for other companies bill this way. The model puts the vendor on the opposite side of the table from the people paying.
Hourly billing never rewards speed
Nobody sets out to be slow. Hourly billing does not require it. It only requires that speed is never rewarded. A problem that drags earns more than a problem solved on the first try. A tool that would cut the work in half cuts the invoice in half. Over a year, those small pulls add up to a firm that is comfortable with work taking longer, and a client who cannot say why the budget keeps moving.
The client pays for it too. Every call is a meter running. People stop asking questions because questions cost money. The vendor learns less about the business, and the work suffers.
AI made the hour the wrong unit
Then the tooling changed. When the problem is well defined, AI tools cut the hours the same work takes. Under hourly billing, that is a pay cut for the vendor. The client never sees the savings, because every pressure in the model runs toward more hours to bill.
We did not want to be in that position. We did not want our clients wondering whether we were. So we took the hour out of the contract.
We bill a fee for a written scope
No hourly billing.
The assessment is a fixed fee. A single product does one job with one scope, such as answering your phones or reading your invoices: a fixed fee for that scope, and after go-live our support and maintenance team runs it on a monthly Run plan. A pod is a monthly fee on a 12-month term, with a production checkpoint at day 90 for a small pod or day 120 for a large pod.
If the scope changes, we quote the change in writing before anyone starts on it.
The scope comes first
A fixed fee is only honest when the scope is specific. "Build us an AI agent" is not a scope. "Answer inbound calls for one location, book into this calendar, hand off to a person on these three triggers" is a scope, and it can carry a price.
This is why the assessment exists. Ten days, an AI inventory, risk tiers, the top 3 workflows with today's numbers, and a written 90-day plan. Nobody is guessing, on either side.
What a fixed fee changes for finance
Three things.
Approval is one budget line
A fixed fee for a named scope fits in a budget line. It needs no quarterly explanation of why the number moved.
The invoice is not a conversation
There is no timesheet to dispute, because there is no timesheet. The invoice carries the fee that was agreed for the scope that was written.
The checkpoint measures the work
A pod is judged at the production checkpoint against the number from the assessment, not against hours logged. That only works when the fee has nothing to do with hours. Otherwise the invoice and the measurement argue with each other, and the invoice usually wins.
The credit
The assessment has a fee. Half the assessment fee is credited, only toward a 12-month contract. The plan is the first piece of the build.
A fixed fee is not a capped estimate
It is not an hourly estimate with a cap. A cap still pays for time, up to a line.
It is a price for a scope, written down before the work starts, and quoted again if the scope moves.
What you get instead
You get a number you can approve, a scope you can hold us to, and a checkpoint that asks one question: did the number from the assessment move. The mechanics are on the pricing page. If there is a fit, the first paid step is the 10-day assessment.
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