Why we charge for the first week, and give away the plan

Free scoping is a bad deal for everyone involved. The agency doing it has to recover the cost somewhere, which means it is priced into the project you eventually sign. And because it is unpaid, the incentive is to spend as little time as possible on it and as much as possible on the pitch.

What the week contains

Five working days, a fixed fee, and two of our people. We read the existing code, talk to the people who operate the system daily, and look at the analytics rather than the dashboard someone built to summarise the analytics. At the end there is a written document: current-state assessment, the two or three viable approaches, the trade-offs of each in plain language, a milestone plan, and a budget band.

It is yours regardless of what happens next. No clauses, no dependency on signing anything.

The obvious objection

People ask whether we are giving away the valuable part. Sometimes, yes. About one client in five takes the document and executes it internally, which is the correct decision when they have the team for it.

What we get in exchange is a filter. The clients who continue after a framing week have read a document that says exactly what the work involves, including the parts that will be difficult. Nobody is surprised in month three. Our project margin is better on those engagements than it ever was on the ones we won with a proposal deck, because the scope was honest before anyone committed to it.

What it changes about the pitch

We stopped doing speculative creative work entirely. We do not produce homepage concepts for prospects. If a studio is showing you designs before it has read your codebase, it is showing you a guess with good typography.

The framing week is the alternative: less flattering, considerably more useful.