One rate, no meter

One rate, and what sits inside it

Engineering, design, code review, testing, deployment, and the coordination that makes those happen. There is no setup fee, no project-management fee, and no separate line for the work of running the project — that work is the job, not an add-on.

For continuous product work the shape is a monthly rate for a senior team. For a bounded piece of work or ongoing maintenance, hourly is often the honest answer and we will say so. What does not exist in either shape is a meter that starts when you send a message.

Why the meter works against you

Metered billing quietly prices the most valuable thing in a software project: talking to the people building it. When every question has a number attached, you ask fewer of them. You batch up concerns until they are worth an invoice line, and by then the decision is already built.

The change-request process has the same effect from the other direction. A fixed-scope contract has to defend its scope, so every new understanding of the problem becomes a negotiation. The result is an incentive to build what was written down months ago rather than what turned out to be true — and both sides can feel it happening while it happens.

Neither of these is anybody being greedy. It is just what the billing model rewards. So we do not use it.

How scope actually changes

It changes constantly, because you learn things. Under one rate that is a conversation about priority, not about price: something moves up, something moves down, and the weekly deployment shows you the result. The list is explicit and it is yours to reorder.

What that does not mean is unlimited scope at a fixed price — nobody can promise that honestly. It means the cost of changing your mind is a trade-off you make in the open, not a change order you find out about later.

What finance gets

A number that appears on the same day each month and does not move because a sprint went badly. No reconciliation of time entries, no surprise line items, no argument about whether a meeting was billable. Describe what is stuck at /start and the reply includes a ballpark effort alongside the plan, within one business day.