Why we don't publish a price list
A price list filters out the exact buyer with a £1,000 fix. Here is what we do instead, and why we publish a floor rather than a range.
Team Quorix Digital
The engineers and strategists who do the work
- commercials
- scoping
Most studios publish a price list. Some publish "from £X". Almost none will tell you what a bug fix costs, which is the number most prospective clients actually want, because most prospective clients are not building a new platform.
We have deliberately not published a rate card. Here is the reasoning, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.
What a price list actually does
It converts two hard questions into one easy one. Instead of asking "what does this work need?", the reader asks "which row is this?" — and the answer becomes a budget conversation with a vendor rather than a scoping conversation with an engineer.
That is worse for everyone. The client picks a number that fits their budget rather than the number the work needs. We get a project that was scoped backwards, from the price down instead of the problem up.
Who it filters out
The buyer with a broken system and £1,500 to spend on it is the most time-pressured buyer a studio has, and they are the easiest to help. They have a real problem, a real deadline, and no appetite for a discovery process.
A published rate card loses them, because there is no row for them. "From £5,000" reads as "not for us". The project sits broken for another six months while they look for someone who will just fix it.
So our published figure is a floor, not a range: projects start at £1,000. That is honest — it is genuinely the smallest useful engagement we will take — and it puts us in front of the buyer who has a small problem and needs someone who will start.
The other reason, which is more self-interested
The moment you publish a number, you have a commercial interest in the project being worth that number. That is a subtle and corrosive shift in how a conversation goes.
A studio quoting per project is arguing about scope. A studio with a price list is quietly arguing for scope. Those are different conversations, and only one of them is the client's friend.
What we do instead
- A £1,000 minimum, published. Not hidden behind "from", because hedging a number you are happy with is just losing the sale.
- A fixed price after scoping, written down, with what is explicitly not included.
- A discovery sprint as a separate, cheap product for people who need to know the shape of the problem before committing budget.
- No hourly rates at all. They reward slow work and they make the client watch the clock.
The trade-off is real: some buyers will walk away because they wanted a number on the website. We have decided that the buyers we would rather work with are the ones who want to understand the problem first.
When we will tell you a number immediately
If you ask "roughly what is this going to cost?" on a first call, we will give you a range. Not a quote — a range, based on how similar projects have actually run. It is not binding, and we will say that.
What we will not do is put a number on the website that we have to honour before we have seen the problem.
If this sounds like your problem
Get a fixed price for your project
We quote per project after scoping, not from a table. A 30-minute call is usually enough to tell you whether the work is worth doing at all — and we will say so if it is not.
No pitch deck. A 30-minute call, and we will tell you if we are the wrong studio for this.
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