JournalThe studio
Pricing creative work without flinching
We publish a catalogue and quote fixed prices before starting. Here is why hourly billing is a bad deal for both sides.
Every service BOAN sells has a price, and that price is in a catalogue that the quote builder and this website read from the same row. When you ask what a brand identity costs, you get a number in the first conversation rather than a promise to come back to you.
That is unusual in this industry, and the reasons people give for avoiding it are worth taking seriously before dismissing.
The case against publishing prices
- 01Every project is different, so a single number is misleading
- 02It lets competitors undercut you on a figure rather than on the work
- 03Clients anchor to the lowest number on the page and negotiate from there
All three are true. The first is handled by quoting properly rather than by hiding: the catalogue price is what a normal version of that work costs, and the quote adjusts it for your actual scope. The second matters less than it sounds, because a client choosing purely on price was never going to be a good client. The third is real and we live with it.
The case for it
Hourly billing pays a studio for being slow. That is not a moral complaint, it is an incentive problem: the faster we get at something, the less we earn for doing it, which means every improvement to our own process costs us money. Fixed pricing inverts that. If we find a better way to build a store, we keep the difference, and the client pays the number they agreed to either way.
It also removes the worst conversation in the business, which is the invoice that arrives larger than expected. Nobody has ever enjoyed that call. Nobody has ever recommended a studio after one.
How a quote actually gets built
You fill in a brief. We pick lines from the same catalogue you can read on the services page, adjust quantities, and send a quote with a validity date on it. Accept it and the price is fixed. If scope changes later, that is a new line on a new quote, discussed before the work happens rather than discovered afterwards.
None of this is complicated. It is just written down, which turns out to be most of it.
If any of that is the argument you are currently having internally, we are probably the right people to have it with.
