How we scope a build so the price does not move

Nearly every client who comes to us has a story about a project that started at one number and finished at a much larger one. It has made people reasonably suspicious of fixed prices, and the suspicion is earned: a fixed price on a vague scope is not a price, it is an opening position.

The estimate is the deliverable

We charge for the scoping phase and it produces something you own outright: a page-by-page specification, a content inventory, the integrations named individually, and a list of everything explicitly out of scope. If you take that document to another agency, it will get you a comparable quote. That is deliberate. A scope that only works with us is a scope designed to trap you.

It usually takes a week to ten days and involves more questions about your operations than about your website, because the expensive surprises are almost never design. They are the third-party system nobody mentioned until week five.

Out of scope is the useful half

Most scoping documents list what is included. The overruns live in what was assumed. Ours names them:

• Content writing, unless it is a line item
• Photography
• Migrating data from a system we have not been shown
• Changes to the design after sign-off, which are quoted as a change, not absorbed
• Integrations with anything not named in the document

That last one causes the most friction and prevents the most damage. It should connect to our CRM is not a specification. Which CRM, which fields, in which direction, and does it have an interface we are allowed to use.

Two things we will not fix-price

Migrating content we have not seen. Two thousand blog posts in a tidy export is a day. Two thousand posts across three systems with inconsistent images is three weeks. We quote a sample migration first, then price the rest from what it taught us.

Ongoing SEO. We can fix-price the technical work, because it is finite. We will not fix-price a ranking, because we do not control your competitors. Anyone who does is selling you a number they cannot control.

What happens when we are wrong

Occasionally we underestimate. If we missed something that was in the specification, it is our cost and we absorb it, which has happened three times and is the correct outcome. If something genuinely new appears, it is quoted as a change before any work starts, never discovered on the invoice.

That distinction is the whole contract. Fixed price means the risk of our own estimate sits with us. It does not mean unlimited scope, and being explicit about that up front is why the number tends to hold.