Two pages, the same at a glance
One is a heading, three paragraphs and a picture.
The next pulls its content from somewhere else, behaves differently on a phone, and has a form on it that has to reach you and not a spam folder.
What a project costs, and what decides the number
What you are paying for is time you stop spending on this, and something you own at the end of it. What that costs depends on the work.
- Priced per project, never per page
- A floor you can check yourself
01
Why there is no price list
I price each project on what the work actually needs. Not per page, not per screen, and not per hour.
A price list has to pick a unit, a page or a screen or a feature, and charge the same for every one of them. They are never the same amount of work.
Two screens, the same at a glance
One shows you a list.
The next takes in what people type, decides what happens next, and has to be right every time it runs.
So somebody who quotes your project from an email is doing one of two things.
Guessing
They are guessing, and they will come back when the guess runs out.
One number for everybody
Or they have one number they give everybody, which means they have stopped pricing the work and started pricing the enquiry.
02
The floor nobody can go below
I cannot tell you what yours costs. I can tell you what the work costs to produce, which is a number you can check without me.
What one person costs a month
Average monthly wage in Estonia, information and communication €3,821 Employer taxes, 33.8% €1,291 One person, one month €5,112 What is actually buyable
Working days in a month 21 Keeping current −4 Quoting, invoicing, accounts −2 Days anyone can buy 15 Four days a month is not padding.
You do not want a developer who stopped learning. This work changes underneath you, and the person who has not kept up will build yours the way it was built five years ago and charge you the same. That time is in every project, including yours.
The floor that falls out of it
The shortest a real project has taken 5 days, a third of the fifteen The floor €1,704 And that is cost.
Before software, before hardware, before anything is earned. A quote below that, for the same five days, comes from somebody who has not read your project, or who intends to find the missing money later.
Everything above is public. The wage is what Statistics Estonia publishes for information and communication, the sector this work sits in and the highest paid in the country. The tax is what every Estonian company pays on top of a wage. Neither is my rate, and neither is what I pay anybody.
That is the floor, not an estimate. What yours costs is the next question, and the things that move it are below.
03
What actually drives the number
How many parts, and how different they are
Ten pages that share one shape is a smaller job than four that do not. Five screens that work the same way cost less than three that do not.
Whether the material exists
Text that is written and pictures that exist is one project. Text that has to be found, chased and adapted is another. A tool asks the same about its rules: either somebody can say what happens in the awkward cases, or nobody can and we find them one at a time.
What is already there
How much of it can come across as it stands. A layout kept inside a page builder cannot come across at all, and gets rebuilt by hand. A tool that has to read from or write to something you already run can only do what that system allows.
Who has to approve it
And how many of them there are. This is the one people never mention, and it moves the timeline more than anything technical.
What happens after it launches
How often it will change, and who changes it, decides how it is built in the first place.
04
What this page cannot tell you
It cannot tell you what yours costs. Nothing on a page can, and anybody whose page tries is pricing the enquiry.
If it can be priced from a conversation
You get a written quote, and it costs you nothing.
If it still has to be worked out
That is what roadmapping is for: €350, plus VAT where applicable, credited against the first stage, and the plan is yours to keep whatever you decide afterwards.
Tell me what you have
Tell me what you have and what it has to do. If it can be priced from that, I will send you a quote and it will not cost you anything.