We went ahead and deployed our new website, we're back on Jekyll on Cloudflare Workers, the process is pretty quick, I've always liked Jekyll for a lot of reasons (good basis, doesn't mix up a bunch of SPA concerns, lightweight, extensible with Ruby, front-matter is a first-class concern)

So with the new site comes some major new changes, we have some new pages better describing what we do, we have some regional pages up and we'll probably have more in the future, we have a list of our projects publicly (we used to have a hidden portfolio a couple of sites ago)

One of the major changes: public pricing

Okay, but public pricing?

Along with us using Claude with a lot of our development, Claude has helped a bit with this site – Claude constantly complained "Don't put up pricing", "it doesn't allow you to drive higher margin if people know what you charge"

Yes Claude that's the point, we're not like every dev house where your pricing fits your business size (oh, you got lots of money, guess our hourly rate went up…). We work backwards from what we pay our engineers, since that's the basis that we have to clear as a business, we put a few levels of margin on top of that which represent our different discount tiers, and that's it. Nothing else special.

I mean Exhibit A of our MSA that shows our rates is basically the same for everybody (there are some edge cases where people get some slightly tweaked rate sheets but mostly driven by stability of the contract).

Weird, so why?

There is a significant number of customers that appreciate that we just shoot straight, someone asks what we think something will cost, we'll throw some numbers based on our experience, not based on me having to come back and figure out what we can squeeze them for, just honest off-the-cuff assessments of what they're trying to do.

Of course we're generally in agreement: I'm giving examples, details can drive differences, but I get a lot of "I can't get a vendor to just shoot straight with me, Will"… well we should really do that up-front too. If the pricing makes you a bit skittish, if you're unsure of how or why we do things, talk to us, I'm more than happy to discuss how this makes sense.

Or hang around for more articles. Along with industry insights, I'm planning to explain a lot of the ethos behind why we do what we do and where these systems and theories come from, some maybe more hot takes than others…

See ya around!