How we priced the 14-day site (and what we got wrong twice)

Fixed pricing sounds like a marketing decision. It's actually an engineering constraint: if the price doesn't move, the variance has to live somewhere else — in scope, in process, or in your margin. The first two versions of our pricing put it in the margin. That's the mistake.

Wrong the first time: pricing the site

Version one priced the artefact — pages, designs, a build. But two sites with identical page counts can differ by a week of effort depending on content readiness and decision speed. The price was fixed; the cost wasn't. Some projects were great; some quietly ate the margin.

Wrong the second time: pricing the hours

Version two backed into the number from estimated hours times a rate — which is just hourly billing wearing a fixed-price costume. The estimate became the battleground, and every scope conversation reopened the math.

What works: pricing the slot

The thing we actually sell is two weeks of the studio's full attention with a launch at the end. That's a slot, like a table at a restaurant. The slot costs the same regardless of what we cook, because the constraint — the calendar — is the same.

Pricing the slot is what makes the rest of the product honest. The page cap exists so the slot is enough. The two-revision limit exists so decisions happen inside the slot. The pre-built system exists so none of the slot is spent on solved problems.

Fixed price isn't a discount strategy. It's a forcing function for a process that doesn't leak.

If you're productizing your own service: don't price the deliverable, and don't price your hours. Price the capacity you're reserving, then build the process that makes that capacity reliably enough.