Because of the nature of our service, it is difficult to pre-estimate any pricing or ranges considering that every organization’s needs are different.
For this reason we offer the first hour consultation at no cost to you, with the exception of a small travel fee if the one way driving distance to you is over 15 miles. During this first consultation, we will establish your needs, and it is here that we discuss the budget for future consultations/visits and work to be done, usually the budget forged at this meeting will be roughly estimated, but will be revised privately and forwarded back to you for approval. If the first consultation runs over an hour, we may ask that you pay a discounted rate for the additional time, or at least the travel expense.
» Our billing is budget-task based, meaning that you can expect each invoice to reflect the price set forth in the budget - any potential discrepancies will be discussed beforehand to adjust the budget as necessary. This ensures that there are no surprise fees at any time during the project.
» The budget is very, very important. Without a proper and realistic budget for any given task there is little chance of a well made solution being set in place, and we simply cannot abide poor worksmanship. We just feel this is worth mentioning before anything.
There are two main budget categories, and they are sometimes combined, other times listed separately: Consultation/Management Budget, and the Fulfillment Budget.
- The Consultation and Management budget pays for our consultation, planning and project management time. This budget is generally well defined and stable but may need to be adjusted with time based on actual need. This budget should be flexible up to about 5% above the projected expense.
- The Fulfillment budget secures the financing for potential, expected and actual product required by the project’s tasks including development, design, tangible goods, and pre-made software products and services. This budget should be flexible to about 15% above the projected expense.
The suggested flexibility in the budget is only a guideline set forth in order to secure the project. You will be notified of any potential deviation in the budget and must approve the change or accept another option we may provide at this time.
Depending on the task, a deposit (certain percentage of the task’s budget) may be requested prior to beginning regardless of payment history - generally this can be considered a setup or startup fee, or provides working capital for us to act on your project - this is often the case when some amount of traveling will be involved or if we have overhead on the task. It is not a security deposit. This deposit will usually cover the task to completion and counts toward the cost of the task.
Two special billing cases are:
- Some tasks may require being broken up into milestones at which time a milestone payment is usually due. This typically involves a meeting at each milestone.
- Some tasks may have overhead associated with them and may require you to make a payout during the task in order to make purchases to complete the task, these instances will be noted on the budget sheet and can or may be included in the deposit depending on how soon it is needed.
Please note: we do not hold your money unless specifically requested to do so, as such, we invoice and collect in a proactive and linear manner, that is, if an overhead expense is expected, we collect from you to cover that expense prior to making it. We generally do not carry balances and ask that invoices for any remaining fees be paid at the time of task completion.
Consultation meetings are billed in half hour increments with a minimum of an hour per scheduled meeting at $45 per hour. Other meetings may include installations or setups at your location and will be priced separately under the Fulfillment billing category.