Ever since we started Offroadcode we've taken the stance of never giving fixed price quotes for projects. Some people think this is crazy but allow us to explain why it makes sense for clients and ourselves.
What I'm going to cover here is nothing new to me and probably many other coders out there. To others though (both clients and designers in the business) it can be quite eye opening when I first tell them about it. All through the following post, remember the point below is what we do and what we give our clients.
We always want to give the client the best website we can for their available budget. OffroadcodeTalking about budget shouldn't be a secret!
Asking a client what their budget is can come across as either rude or plain money grabbing. They hold back the true amount thinking we will quote back to them the full amount when we say how much it will cost. Difference is though, we don't give fixed quotes.
We will work up to the amount of budget the client is happy to spend. That to us makes sense. The clients gets the best site they are happy to pay for at a fair price.
We don't deliver rubbish for that money, we deliever the best we can to the amount of budget/time the user has. At the end of that we will have delievered the best, most feature rich site we could. All the client need do is pick and choose which features they want on their site.
"One assumption we're making is that you do have an idea of how much actual time a feature might take to complete. If you don't, you really shouldn't be in charge of quoting for a feature."
XD Just one of the great things!