2026-09-20
Why We Only Do Fixed-Price Sprints
Not financial advice. Verify claims independently.
Hourly billing rewards slowness. Here's the alternative structure that keeps everyone honest.
Desk notes from client work. Verify claims independently — not a verified account of any production system.
Hourly billing rewards the wrong behavior. The longer a project drifts, the more the agency earns. Founders feel it; engineers feel it; nobody says it out loud.
The structure
- Discovery (optional, 1 week) — architecture sketch, risk register, and a fixed-price proposal. Paid. Not free bait.
- Build sprint (2–3 weeks) — one scoped deliverable, staging URL, docs, handoff call.
- Retainer desk (monthly) — priority queue for teams that already trust us.
Every sprint has a written definition of done. If scope expands, we open a new work order — we don’t quietly eat the hours.
Why clients like it
- They can budget.
- They get a shippable increment, not a status deck.
- They always know who’s writing the code (us — both seniors).
Why we like it
- We estimate carefully, then protect the estimate.
- No junior handoffs, no “staffing plan” theater.
- We can say no to work that doesn’t fit a sprint box.
A typical work order
Realtime quote fan-out for mobile. Three weeks. Websocket gateway, symbol sharding, React Native SDK stub. Price band written on the order before kickoff. Shipped.
That’s the whole business model. Two people. Fixed scope. Fingerprints on the work.
Ready to try it? Open a work order on the homepage — or poke the product we built: Stock Picks.
From the desk
Want this built into your product?
Open a work order — or try Stock Picks, the paper-trading app we shipped as our flagship case study.