Survey the ground, then price the build.
Custom software goes wrong in the first two weeks, not the last two. Almost every expensive failure traces back to a scope that was agreed before anyone understood the process it was meant to replace. So we separate the understanding from the building, put a price on the understanding, and let you decide what to do with it.
What actually happens between kickoff and delivery.
Five business days, roughly three hours of your time, and a great deal of ours. The stages below run in order, and the only ones that need your calendar are the two sessions.
The questionnaire
A short set of written questions goes out as soon as payment clears. It covers what the process looks like today, who touches it, what has already been tried and what a good outcome would look like. Answering it takes most people half an hour, and it means the session opens on the second layer of the problem instead of the first.
The strategy and workflow session
Ninety minutes, with the people who live inside the process rather than only the person paying for the project. We walk the workflow end to end, find the places where people are quietly compensating for the system, and pin down what success would have to look like for this to be worth building.
Independent analysis
This is where most of the five days go, and it happens without you. We look at what the market already sells, at what your existing systems can be made to do, and at what would genuinely have to be written. We work out the architecture, the data flows, the integration points, the boundaries around any automation or AI, and the technical risks worth naming early.
The walkthrough
Forty five minutes in which we present the whole finding, including the recommendation, the Phase 1 scope, the exclusions, the schedule and the fixed price. We would rather take the hard questions live than have you discover an assumption three weeks into a build.
One consolidated revision
You gather your feedback, send it once, and we fold it into a final version of every document. Consolidating it is deliberate: a single considered pass produces a better document than six rounds of small corrections, and it keeps the engagement inside its fixed price.
The documents are yours
Every completed document is delivered to you regardless of what you decide next. If the recommendation is a build and you want it, the fixed price proposal is already in your hands and the whole blueprint fee comes off it when you approve within thirty days.
The finding we will not soften to protect a sale.
A discovery that can only conclude in our favour is not a discovery, it is a sales call with a fee attached. So let us be precise about what follows when the ground will not support a build.
You get the same documents
The plan, the analysis, the reasoning and the risks arrive exactly as they would have. What changes is the last section: instead of a build proposal it carries the recommendation, whether that is a product to evaluate, a change to make inside a system you already own, or a decision to settle before any code is worth writing.
The fee is not refunded, and should not be
You paid for an answer, and you received one. It happens to be an answer that saved you the cost of a build, which is usually ten times what the blueprint cost. Refunding it would only mean we could not afford to reach that conclusion honestly next time.
We tell you what we would do
A recommendation against building is not a shrug. It names the alternative, sets out what it would cost, and says plainly what you give up by taking it. If evaluating a product is the right next step, the criteria to judge it on are written down for you.
The door stays open
Businesses change. A finding of wait rather than build often becomes a build twelve months later, with the blueprint still on file and most of the thinking already done. Nothing about that conversation starts from zero.
A fixed price, against a scope you have already read.
The proposal prices the Phase 1 scope described in the blueprint. One number, against a document you have had time to argue with, with the exclusions listed in the same place as the inclusions.
Approving that build within thirty days of delivery brings the entire $2,500 blueprint fee off the price, provided the build is $25,000 or more. From there the work runs against the milestones already written into the plan, and anything outside the agreed scope is quoted separately rather than absorbed quietly and billed later.
What we need from you
- About half an hour on the questionnaire, in writing.
- Ninety minutes for the workflow session, with the people who do the work.
- Forty five minutes for the walkthrough.
- Your feedback gathered once, not in installments.
Roughly three hours in total. The blocker is almost never the hours, it is getting the right two or three people into the same ninety minutes, so it is worth checking their calendars before you book the fit call.
Start with the call, not the contract.
No cart, no payment button, and nothing to sign before we have both worked out whether there is a project here worth doing.