Pricing & Positioning

TL;DR

We sell productized fixed-price builds with a mandatory monthly retainer attached, gated by a paid Discovery Sprint. We do not bill clients hourly — our AI tooling lets us deliver in a fraction of the time, and hourly billing would punish us for our own efficiency. We capture that margin internally.

Year 1 looks like a fast-moving productized speed shop. Year 3 looks like an embedded fractional AI/digital team for 4–6 mid-market clients on retainer. The path between them is a discipline of saying no to bad revenue.

The Model

Hybrid: fixed productized build + mandatory monthly retainer + paid Discovery Sprint as the sales gate. Three things, every engagement, every time.

• Productized build — three off-the-shelf packages cover 80% of inbound. Custom work starts at $20k+ and is preceded by Discovery.
• Mandatory retainer — every build ships with a monthly maintenance contract. If they refuse, we refuse the build.
• Paid Discovery — anything over $15k starts with a $1.5k–$3k two-week scoping engagement. Credited 100% if they proceed.

Year 1 Packages

Default menu. Cousin sells from these one-pagers; they cover the live pipeline today.

Pricing Rationale

The numbers above are intentionally below specialist agency floor and above commodity-freelancer ceiling. Nothing here is aspirational; it's where the work actually lives in the 2026 market.

Reference points for $7,500

• A graphic designer charges $1,500–$5,000 for a single logo
• A wedding photographer charges $3,500–$8,000 for one day of work
• An attorney drafts a single contract for $2,000–$3,000
• A plumber installs a water heater for $3,000–$5,000

A $7,500 custom marketing site with payments, integrations, and a maintenance retainer is in the same band — slightly above mid-tier freelancer ($5k ceiling), slightly below regional agency floor ($8k–$10k). It is a fair price, not a stretch one.

Why we don't bill hourly

Our AI tooling lets us deliver in a fraction of the time a traditional agency takes. Billing by the hour would punish us for our own efficiency: a $7,500 fixed-price project completed in three days yields a strong effective margin; the same project billed hourly at $150/hour yields $3,600. Clients are buying the outcome, not our hours, and they're getting the speed advantage in their delivery timeline. The margin captured by AI is ours to keep — it's the entire reason this business model works at all.

What clients are actually paying for

A $7,500 site that adds $20,000/yr in bookings to a guide service is a four-month payback. A $12,500 nonprofit engagement engine that automates registrations and donations replaces 5+ hours/week of volunteer admin labor. A $20,000 AI customer-support agent that handles after-hours inquiries saves a mid-tier retailer $40,000/yr in staffing. Clients pay for the result; our cost-of-delivery is irrelevant to them.

Why we lead with fixed prices, not "value-based"

Most SMBs in our target band ($500k–$50M revenue) have weak internal analytics — they often can't articulate their own customer acquisition cost, support labor cost, or hours-saved baseline. That makes "we'll take 20% of the value we create" impossible to negotiate honestly: there's no agreed-upon baseline to multiply against. Productized fixed pricing solves this — the client knows the number, we know our delivery cost, and the conversation is about scope, not math the client can't do. Performance-tied or outcome-based pricing comes later, with clients who have mature analytics.

Retainers (mandatory on every build)

Discovery Sprint

$1,500–$3,000, 1–2 weeks. Required for any project ≥ $15k.

Deliverables:

• Technical scope document with explicit "will / won't do" perimeter
• Data readiness assessment
• ROI projection
• Fixed-price implementation quote

Credited 100% toward the build if they proceed. This is our scope-creep insurance and our free-consulting killer. If they won't pay $1,500 to plan, they won't honor a $20,000 quote — we want to qualify them out at the cheapest possible step.

Payment Terms — 40 / 40 / 20

Not 50/50. Clients stall the launch and we starve.

The "30 days after MVP" clause is the load-bearing piece. It guarantees we're paid for technical labor even if the client indefinitely stalls the public launch.

Contract Stack (non-negotiable)

1. Scope perimeter — explicit "what the AI will and won't do." Anything outside requires a Change Order at a $500 minimum.
2. AI Addendum — IP carve-out: client owns final outputs; we and our vendors retain underlying models, prompts, and tooling.
3. No-Training clause — guarantees client data is not used to train public foundational models. Enterprise API tiers only.
4. Hallucination liability shift — outputs delivered "as-is," human-in-the-loop required for consequential decisions.
5. Pass-through cost clause — token, compute, hosting costs billed at provider rate, no markup, no risk to us.
6. Change Order template — flat $500 minimum so small asks become real revenue.

One-time investment: ~$2,000–$3,000 with a contracts attorney to draft a master services agreement we reuse forever.

Sales Playbook

For when these come up on calls.

Pipeline Mapping

Year 1 → Year 3 Evolution

Things to Pressure-Test

• Pricing confidence vs. pipeline reality — the prices are right; the open question is whether sales is talking to buyers who fit them. Run three Discovery conversations at $7,500 and watch the reactions: 3 of 3 walk away → wrong segment, not wrong price; 1–2 walk and 1–2 nod → price is fine and closing rate is a sales skill; 3 of 3 nod → we're underpriced. Don't drop the floor based on the first "no."
• The $7,500 Year 1 floor — defensible in PNW SMB. May feel high to early friends-and-family leads. If we close 3 deals at $7.5k in month 1, hold. If sales is consistently being routed to volunteer-run nonprofits with no budget, the answer is "different buyers," not "lower price."
• Foundation pricing outside PNW — if sales closes leads outside the region, we may price-shop against $2k template shops. Productization differentiators (speed guarantee, AI bundled, design system) need to hold the price.
• The "no retainer = no build" rule — it's the right rule, but be prepared to apply it. The first time a $7,500 client says no to the retainer, we have to actually walk. That sets the tone for the next 50 deals.
• Year 3 fractional math — $8k–$12k/mo retainers across 4–5 clients at 1–2 days/week each saturates the builder's capacity. That's the trade: Year 3 is mostly retainer-locked with little new acquisition. Plan for that on purpose, not by accident.
• Year 1 clients are not Year 3 clients — a volunteer-run nonprofit or single-owner salon will never become a $10k/mo Fractional CTO retainer. The Year 3 client base requires a separate sales motion targeting mid-market businesses ($10M+ revenue) with internal teams and budget authority. Expect to graduate beyond the Year 1 pipeline rather than upsell it. Some Year 1 relationships continue at the Care tier; most don't, and that's fine.
• Two-person context-switching — even with extreme AI acceleration, juggling 10–12 distinct codebases, client personalities, and edge cases is a real cap on Year 1 throughput. Strict adherence to the productized packages — same stack, same deployment pattern, same retainer terms — is the only way the volume math works. Bespoke builds inflate the cognitive load disproportionate to revenue.

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