Fixed price with a written scope is the default for every project we take on. It’s the only way we’ve priced freelance work for more than nine years, across 525 delivered orders rated 4.9 from 335 reviews on Fiverr and 5.0 from 156 on Freelancer. Check both yourself on our reviews page rather than take our word for the number.
Why fixed instead of hourly
Hourly billing puts the client and the person doing the work on opposite sides of the clock: every hour billed helps one side and costs the other. Fixed price removes that split. The number is set before work starts, so finishing sooner is good for both sides instead of only one.
It also means you know what the project costs before committing to it, instead of finding out at the end how long it actually took. For most clients, that’s worth more than whatever a smooth hourly job might have saved.
How a price gets built
The price follows the scope, and it never works the other way around. We write down what’s being built, feature by feature, plus what’s explicitly left out, before we put a number on anything. If the scope isn’t written yet, the price isn’t either.
The document itself, and how we build it, is covered in how we scope fixed-price projects. The short version: a features list alone doesn’t stop a dispute from happening. Writing down what’s excluded, the things a client would otherwise assume were bundled in, is what does that.
What happens when scope changes
Scope changes mid-project are ordinary and not a problem by themselves. What matters is how they’re handled. A change doesn’t get absorbed into whatever’s already underway at whatever price was already agreed. It becomes its own line: scoped the way the original work was scoped, priced the way the original work was priced, then scheduled into the current milestone plan or added to it.
The second scoping conversation follows the same process as the first one. There’s no looser standard for something added partway through.
Milestones and payment
Payments are broken into milestones, and each one is tied to a deliverable you can look at and accept, like a working login flow or a checkout that takes a real test card, rather than a date on the calendar. Payment follows acceptance of that piece of work. The full sequence a project moves through, from first contact to handover, is on how projects run.
When we say no
Some projects don’t get a fixed-price quote from us, and some don’t get taken on at all. We turn down work we can’t scope honestly, where the requirements are too undefined to write a real included list and excluded list against. We turn down budgets that would force corner-cutting to hit the number, since a fixed price only holds up if the number reflects the actual work. And where a cheaper answer already exists, an off-the-shelf tool or a template that does the job, we say which one instead of building something custom to replace it.
What decides it is whether we can put an honest number on the work in front of us, not the size of the project. When we can, you get a fixed price and a written scope before anything starts. When we can’t, we tell you that instead, along with what we’d need to know to get there. Tell us what you’re building and we’ll give you a straight answer about which one applies.