Fixed price, not time and materials: how we scope and price analytics work

Most fixed-price analytics quotes are a guess dressed up as a number. Heres what we document before we will put a firm price on a Build phase, and when a day-rate arrangement genuinely serves you better.

Most fixed-price quotes in analytics are a guess wearing a suit. A supplier who prices before they understand your data has either padded the number to cover what they cannot see, or priced it thin to win the work and will claw the difference back through change requests once you are committed. Either way, you are the one carrying the risk.

We default to fixed price too, but only once we actually know what we are pricing. This is what that looks like in practice: what has to be true before we will put a number on a Build phase, what goes in the document that number depends on, and the specific situations where we tell a client that a day-rate arrangement genuinely suits them better.

Why we default to fixed price

Fixed price aligns incentives properly. You know the cost before work starts, and we carry the risk of scope estimation rather than passing overruns on to you. It also forces genuine discipline earlier in the process, because a fixed-price Build quote is only as good as the discovery work that produced it. That discovery stage, what we call Establish, is priced and delivered as its own piece of work for exactly this reason.

A day-rate, time and materials model is available for clients who specifically prefer it, but it is not our default, and later in this piece we cover when that arrangement genuinely serves you better.

What has to be true before we quote

Five things need to be in writing before a Build phase is quoted. The inclusions: which dashboards, data sources and users are in scope. The exclusions: what is explicitly not covered, so a request for something outside it is recognised as a change rather than an argument later. The assumptions the price depends on, typically things like source system access being available from week one, and a named business stakeholder available for sign-off at each milestone. The milestones the fixed price is broken into, each with its own defined output. And the success criteria: what a stakeholder needs to see and agree to for a milestone to count as delivered, not just built.

This comes out of the Establish phase, which is why Establish is priced and delivered as its own fixed-price piece of work in its own right, covered in more detail in our piece on phased analytics delivery. A Build quote is only as reliable as the discovery that produced it, and skipping that step is how fixed price turns into a guess.

When time and materials makes more sense instead

A day-rate, time and materials model is available for clients who specifically prefer it. It suits situations where the work itself is genuinely exploratory, where requirements will keep shifting as you learn, or where you want ongoing access to consulting time without a fixed deliverable attached to it.

Our Continuity support arrangement, for ongoing help after a platform is live, is priced this way too, as a monthly retainer based on a defined consulting day allocation rather than a fixed-scope quote. The difference is that you are choosing flexibility deliberately, not accepting it because nobody scoped the work properly.

What happens when the scope needs to change anyway

Genuinely new requirements do come up, and fixed price does not mean pretending they have not. When something outside the agreed scope surfaces during a Build phase, we log it, assess what it actually costs in time and risk, and put the change in writing before any work starts on it. Our approach to change control is covered in more detail in our piece on scope creep and change requests.

The fixed price protects the plan you agreed to. It does not prevent the plan from changing when there is a good reason, it just makes sure that change is a decision both sides make deliberately, with the cost attached, rather than something that quietly expands the job you thought you were paying for.

What this means for you

If a supplier can give you a firm number before they have looked at your data, that is not confidence, it is a guess with your name on it. Ask what they would need to know before pricing it honestly, and expect the answer to involve some form of paid discovery first.

If you want to see what a properly scoped fixed-price proposal looks like for your organisation, get in touch and we will walk you through it.