A Brief on Pricing Discovery
Why we charge for discovery and how that conversation usually goes.
The single biggest predictor of project success isn't the budget or the timeline — it's whether the client and the studio share a model of what the work is. We charge for discovery because building that shared model takes real time, and free discovery work creates a perverse incentive to skip it.
A typical discovery for us is two to three weeks, runs in the $8-15k range, and produces a written brief that the rest of the project depends on. Clients who balk at this are almost always the same clients who, mid-project, will ask 'wait, what are we actually building?' — at which point we're billing a week of work to answer a question that should have been answered before kickoff.
We've stopped trying to convince clients who don't see it. The work is better with the clients who do.