An hourly rate answers a question you didn't ask: "how much does an hour of this person's time cost?" What you actually want to know is "how much will my project cost, total, and when will it be done?" Fixed pricing answers that question directly. Hourly pricing makes you calculate it yourself, with someone else's clock running.
Why we quote fixed prices
Every tier we publish — from a $350 single page to a SaaS build starting at $1,500 — is a scope, not a time estimate. Before any work starts, we write down exactly what's included: how many pages or screens, what's covered by revisions, what counts as a separate add-on. You approve that scope, and the number on the page is the number on the invoice.
This only works because AI-accelerated development makes our own estimates more reliable, not less. When drafting work lands in a day instead of a week, the range of "how long could this actually take" gets much narrower, which is what makes a fixed number safe to commit to in the first place.
How to tell if a "fixed-price" quote is actually fixed
- Ask for the scope in writing. A real fixed-price quote lists deliverables, not just a total. If a "fixed" quote doesn't name a page count, feature list, or revision limit, it isn't actually fixed.
- Ask what counts as a change request. Every project scope has edges. What happens if you ask for something outside it should be defined before you sign, not negotiated mid-project.
- Ask how revisions are counted. "Unlimited revisions" sounds generous and is usually a sign the scope wasn't tight enough to hold a number — someone pays for that gap eventually.
When hourly still makes sense
Open-ended retainers — ongoing maintenance, a few hours a month of iteration on a live product — genuinely don't fit a fixed-scope model, because there's no fixed deliverable to scope. That's the one place we use ongoing support arrangements instead of a flat number, and we say so upfront rather than forcing every engagement into the same shape.
If you're comparing quotes for a website, web app or SaaS MVP, the fixed-price one with a written scope is usually the safer bet — not because hourly billing is dishonest, but because a scope forces both sides to agree on what "done" means before the invoice arrives.