Why I never quote a fixed price

On creativity, complexity, and fairness in pricing services.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova

I know people who swear by fixed project pricing for creative services. Or better yet, “productizing” their services into standard packages with pre-defined scopes and fixed prices. It’s appealing to clients because the total cost is transparent and known upfront.

And yet, fixed project pricing doesn’t work at all for me. Not even a little bit. Out of all the pricing methods I’ve tried, it’s by far the worst. Let me explain why.

Complex problem-solving has too many unknowns

I’m a UX/UI designer who specialises in bespoke strategy and design for complex digital experiences and interfaces. My services can’t be standardized or productized. What I do is valuable precisely because it’s never the same twice. Every business and project has its own set of unique variables. There’s no off-the-shelf solution for what I provide.

If you’re in the same line of work, you’ll know that every good creative process is designed to question, uncover, explore, iterate, and evolve both the definition of the problem and its solution.

It’s impossible to know the scope of a job before it starts because part of that job is stretching the bounds of its brief to uncover the true scope. I can’t count the number of times this early strategy work has resulted in a doubling of the assumed scope.

This “discovery” phase is the bare minimum requirement before the remainder of the job can be accurately estimated and priced, and even then, it’s often only adequate for pricing the next phase of the project but not the whole thing.

Yet some people offer fixed-price quotes before that discovery work has begun.

How? I can only assume they’re providing much simpler services than I am.

You can’t cost without a scope

A comprehensive, unchanging scope is required to calculate a fixed price. But if you think you have a known scope before the…