Scope and pricing
Fixed scope, fixed price: how we quote a small automation
How a small automation goes from a $500 audit to a written fixed-price proposal, and why a defined scope keeps the bill from drifting.Hourly billing has a structural problem for a small automation: the person paying carries all the risk. If the work takes twice as long as expected, the invoice doubles, and the client rarely has the information to argue. Before any build starts, FutureWave defines the scope, writes it down, and attaches a price that does not move.
The audit is what makes a fixed price possible.
You cannot fix a price on a problem nobody has looked at. A build starts with an Automation Audit, priced at $500 and credited in full toward the first build. The audit maps the current process, names the pain points, and lands on a specific first workflow worth automating. One example: a web form feeds a CRM, tags the lead, and sends a follow-up email within five minutes, and we route anything missing a required field to a person.
Where the number comes from
The audit pins down what the price depends on.
Once that boundary exists on paper, the estimate stops being a guess.Inputs
What starts the workflow and where the data comes from.
Outputs
What the automation produces and where it lands.
Tools involved
A workflow platform, a CRM, email, and sometimes a chat alert.
Exceptions
The cases the workflow cannot pass straight through.
We write the fixed-price proposal against that map. Most first builds land between $4,000 and $7,000, scoped from the audit. That range is only a signpost; the exact figure comes from what the audit found.
What "fixed scope" means
Fixed scope means a written document.
The proposal lists the deliverables, the systems it connects, the cases it handles, and the exceptions it leaves to a person.Deliverables
The workflows the build produces, each one a specific outcome.
Connected systems
The tools the automation reads from and writes to.
Cases it handles
The situations the workflow processes on its own.
Exceptions we leave to a person
Disputed invoices and similar cases stay with a person on purpose.
If the audit found that we should automate invoice follow-up but leave disputed invoices with a person, the proposal says so, and both sides can point to the same paragraph and agree on what "done" looks like. That written boundary protects the client. Because there is no hourly meter, a workflow that turns out fiddly to build costs nothing extra, and no open-ended bill arrives at the end of the month.
Handling change
New requirements become their own small proposal.
Requirements do change once a real workflow starts taking shape.Someone realises the follow-up email should branch by lead source, or that a second system needs to receive the same record. We handle that the same way every time: the new requirement becomes a separately scoped change, with its own small proposal and its own price, and we agree that price before anyone builds it.
We never quietly add it to the original invoice. The client sees the change, sees what it costs, and says yes or no while the first build proceeds on its original terms.
Where the risk sits
Who carries the estimation risk.
Open-ended and fixed-scope work put the cost of a bad estimate in different places.The client carries it
Scope creep stays invisible until the bill arrives, and the person doing the work has no reason to finish early.
We carry it
Accurate estimation is on us, and we set the client's number before the build begins.
Higher-tier engagements follow the same shape. A Business Systems Blueprint runs from $5,000, scoped to the engagement, and custom software starts at $10,000 with discovery first.
Price the work first