"So After the Deposit, How Much More Will I Owe You?" A Fair Question, and My Answer

A business owner in Ann Arbor emailed me last week. I'll call him James. He runs a busy shop, he'd been dealing with an employee situation, and he was trying to make a decision about his website in the cracks between everything else on his plate. His question was simple and completely fair.

He'd seen our paid discovery session. And he wanted to know: after he pays for that, how much more is he on the hook for?

I get some version of this question a lot. So I want to answer it out loud, the same way I answered James, because if he was wondering, other people are too.

Why there's no single price on the website itself

Here's the part that trips people up. When James asked "how much more after discovery," he was expecting a number. A clean one. And I couldn't give him one, not because I was being cagey, but because I genuinely didn't know yet.

That's what the discovery session is for.

I can't quote a custom website before I understand what the website actually needs to do. How many pages. What it needs to accomplish. Who it's talking to. What's working now and what isn't. Whether you need something simple and clean or something with more moving parts. Those answers change the scope, and the scope is the price.

Quoting a custom site before discovery would be like a builder quoting your house before knowing how many rooms you want. Any number I threw out would either be padded to protect me or lowballed to win the job, and then corrected later. Neither of those is how I want to work with you.

So discovery isn't a hoop. It's the step where we figure out together what you're actually building, so the quote I give you afterward is real.

But you can still give me a ballpark

Now, none of that means I'll leave you completely in the dark until you've paid.

Based on what James had already told me about his business, I could point him in the right direction. I told him his project would likely land in a particular range of our pricing and sent him the page so he could see the numbers for himself. A ballpark I'm willing to stand behind before discovery, and an exact quote after. That's the fair way to do it.

You should never have to commit to a discovery session with no idea whether the project that follows is a few thousand dollars or ten times that. If someone asks me for a rough range up front, they get one. What I won't do is pretend a rough range is a precise quote, because that's where people get burned.

Why I put all of this in writing

I could have written James a vague, reassuring email that danced around the numbers to keep him on the hook. Plenty of shops do exactly that. Keep the pricing fuzzy, get you emotionally invested, then reveal the real cost once you're too far in to walk away.

I'd rather just tell you.

If discovery leads to a quote that doesn't work for your budget, I want you to know that before you've spent much, not after. Clarity early is good for you, and it's good for me too, because the clients who hire me after a straight conversation are the ones who stick around for years.

James is still deciding, and that's fine. He's got a lot on his plate and a website is one item on a long list. But he's deciding with real information instead of a sales fog, and that's exactly how I want it.

If you've got the same question

If you've been wondering the same thing James was, here's the short version. Discovery helps us define your project so I can give you a real quote instead of a guess. And if you want a ballpark before you commit to anything, just ask. I'll give you one.

If you want to talk through what your project might look like, call me at 734-249-8028 or email dave@pluscodedesign.com. I'll give you straight answers, the same ones I gave James.