2026-09-24
Why Fintech Clients Get Fixed-Price Sprints
Not financial advice. Verify claims independently.
Hourly billing rewards slowness. In fintech it also punishes the client's biggest risk: scope drift.
The billing model shapes the product:
Hourly billing in fintech = adversarial incentive structure. Every "what if we also..." adds revenue to us and risk to you. The client bears all the cost of their own indecision.
Fixed-price sprints invert it: we define exactly what ships before we start. New ideas queue for the next sprint. The incentive is now efficiency — we profit by shipping fast and correct, not by billing confusion.
Why this matters specifically for trading products: scope drift is catastrophic. "Add crypto," "add options," "add social" mid-sprint is how trading apps become bloated money-losers. The fixed-price model is a scope firewall.
Stock Picks was built this way — sprint scopes, shipped on schedule. It's the only honest way to bill for fintech.
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.