Do you charge a fixed price or by the hour?
What agencies and studios need to publish
They have been burned by a project that doubled, or they are comparing your quote to one structured differently and cannot tell which is cheaper. The pricing model matters more to them than the number.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “Do you charge a fixed price or by the hour?”
- “day rate”
- “retainer or project”
- “how does billing work”
- “fixed fee”
What a complete answer contains
For agencies and studios specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Which models you actually offer — fixed price, day rate, retainer — rather than 'it depends'
- 2
The circumstances in which you use each
- 3
Your day rate or typical project range as a real figure, even if broad
- 4
What triggers a change to a fixed price, and how a change is agreed
- 5
The payment schedule — deposit, milestones, on completion
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Defined projects are fixed price, quoted after a paid discovery. Ongoing work is a monthly retainer from £2,500. We use a day rate of £750 only for short pieces of work under five days. Fixed prices change only if the scope changes, and any change is quoted and agreed in writing before we do it. Projects are 40% on signature, 30% at the halfway milestone, 30% on delivery.
Which page should own it
Pricing or how we work page
What silence costs
The prospect cannot compare your quote with anyone else's, so they choose on the number alone — where you are rarely the cheapest.
More questions agencies and studios get
Related
industry
AI customer support for agencies
Agencies field two kinds of question: what do you do, and what does it cost. Both are answerable from the site, and both currently interrupt someone senior. RubyRep answers them from your services and case study pages, and doubles as something you can deploy on client sites.
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.