How we price a project when the scope genuinely isn't clear yet

Not every single engagement has a scope that's genuinely clear enough for a straightforward fixed price upfront, particularly early product discovery work or a genuinely open-ended, ongoing optimization retainer arrangement. Forcing a fixed price onto scope that's genuinely still undefined at the time of pricing just produces either a heavily padded number nobody involved is actually happy with, or an underpriced one that somebody, usually us, quietly ends up eating the real cost of later on.

When the overall scope genuinely isn't clear yet at the outset, we price a short, separately and clearly scoped discovery phase instead, typically running one to two weeks, whose specific, agreed output is a genuinely clear, confidently estimable scope for the actual larger project that follows. This effectively turns one genuinely unclear situation into two separate, clearly and honestly priced pieces, instead of forcing one dishonest guess covering everything at once.

Ongoing optimization work, continuous SEO effort, active performance marketing management, doesn't have any natural fixed endpoint by its very nature, so we price this kind of engagement as a monthly retainer instead, with a clearly defined scope of specific activities included at each pricing tier, rather than awkwardly trying to fixed-price something that's genuinely, inherently ongoing and open-ended.

For genuinely exploratory technical work where even our own team can't confidently estimate the effort involved upfront, we sometimes price the engagement as time and materials with an explicitly agreed cap that the client formally approves before we'd ever actually exceed it. This approach genuinely protects the client from an open-ended, unpredictable bill, while also honestly acknowledging that neither side can fully and confidently scope this particular kind of work properly in advance.

Most clients are initially hesitant about paying for a discovery phase before the "real" project even begins, since it can feel like an extra cost layered on top of what they actually want. Once we explain that it replaces a padded, defensive guess with an accurate number, most come around, and more than one client has told us afterward that the discovery phase itself surfaced problems worth solving before any building ever started.

Discovery sometimes reveals a project that's genuinely larger or more complex than either side initially assumed going in. When this happens, we present the real scope and real number honestly, with the discovery findings as clear evidence for why the estimate has grown, rather than either quietly absorbing the difference ourselves or springing an unexplained higher number on the client without context.

We ask a simple set of questions before recommending a pricing model to a prospective client: is the deliverable clearly definable in advance, is the work naturally ongoing or does it have a real endpoint, and can either side confidently estimate effort without a dedicated discovery pass first. The answers to these three questions point fairly reliably toward one of the four models described above, rather than requiring us to guess at what feels right for a given client relationship.

We walk through this reasoning openly with every prospective client during the first real scoping conversation, explaining exactly why we're recommending a specific model for their situation rather than simply presenting one option and expecting them to accept it without understanding the underlying logic behind the recommendation.

Some clients strongly prefer the budget predictability of fixed price even when we've explained that the scope genuinely isn't clear enough yet to price it honestly and confidently. In these cases we still offer fixed price, built around a deliberately conservative, well-padded estimate that accounts explicitly for the real uncertainty involved, and we say so plainly: this number includes a real buffer for the unknowns we haven't yet resolved, and a genuinely well-scoped discovery-first approach would likely land at a lower total cost.

Most clients, once they hear this framed honestly with the actual tradeoff spelled out, opt for the two-phase discovery approach instead. The ones who still prefer fixed price despite the honest padding at least understand exactly what they're trading away for that predictability, rather than being surprised by an inflated number without any real explanation for where it came from.

Larger client relationships sometimes genuinely need more than one pricing model running simultaneously: a fixed-price initial build alongside a monthly retainer for the ongoing optimization and maintenance work that naturally follows it. We keep these as clearly separate line items in the contract, each with its own explicit scope and pricing logic, rather than blending them into one number that obscures which portion of the engagement is genuinely fixed and which portion is genuinely ongoing and open-ended.

This separation has made it considerably easier for clients to evaluate each piece of the relationship on its own merits later, deciding independently whether to continue the retainer portion or commission a new fixed-scope project, without the two being artificially tangled together in a single combined number that's harder to reason about clearly.

Not every pricing structure we've tried has actually served both sides well, and we've quietly retired a few over the years once real experience showed their weaknesses. An early version of our time-and-materials cap, set too conservatively low, led to several awkward mid-project conversations about raising the cap that would have been avoidable with a more realistic initial number. We've since built more buffer into how we set these caps from the start, informed directly by that earlier, less comfortable experience.

We treat our own pricing approach the same way we'd treat a client's product: something to keep testing and refining based on real outcomes, not a fixed system decided once early on and never revisited again as we've learned more about what actually works well for both sides of the relationship.