There are many pricing options out there. Every company can use a different one or multiple ones and the way that it impacts every customer is different. Finding the right pricing model that works for you is key. With so many options and so many different kinds of benefits or negatives it is important to. Our Nashville web design team has seen many of these used and tried many as well. What find different options offer different value, a mix of customer satisfaction and feeling great about the deliverables.

When looking for a Nashville web design company, be sure to understand the pricing models. We’ll go through these in detail here, showcasing some of the benefits and some of the negatives with the each one. Ask a lot of questions and make sure that you are being presented with options that you understand so you can influence them if needed for your best interest.

The first pricing model is going to be hourly pricing. We get this question at our Nashville web design company all the time. How much do you charge per hour? Rarely do we work hourly unless the task is quick and easy and it is an existing clients. The problem with working hourly for a business owner is he is not trained in website development and has no idea what should be done in one hour. If I tell you we charge $175 per hour and someone else charges you 25 per hour is it reasonable to think that we are nine times faster? Or what else are we going to provide in that hour that offers valued beyond just getting your task done. At our Nashville web design group, we actually offer documentation, training, teacher request, and a deployment plan, and a change log that will group all of the changes we made and help the next person to understand it. With our quality assurance and our project management all baked into that hour, how can one compare it to a developer who is simply dropping in some code and consider these an apples to apples comparison? You cannot.

The biggest problem we have with hourly development is you have no idea how many hours it’s going to take to do some thing and generally your website developer does not either. From experience, we can tell you most almost all developers are horrible at estimating. A four hour estimate is often an 8 to 12 hour estimate rather than a five or six hour estimate with one or two hours difference. The developer sees this quite differently from a business owner. They have a guess that they made and a business owner who is willing to pay their hourly rate up to and beyond the estimated hours. This makes communication even more important, yet most do not excel at it and are some white deficient. Usually, working hourly does not equate to a finished product on time on budget and the developer working either slowly, unless they have a hourly rate that is well beyond the value that they’re actually providing. 

On the flipside, positives of an hourly rate are if you have all the conditions met, you can get it cheaper. That’s a lot of its. You need a quick easy project, a cost-efficient developer, the occasional minor change, experience having done this sort of change before, and great communication. To sum it up, hourly hourly rate can be great for very minor changes using the same developer over and over and insinuations where you know it will be quick and easy for this repeat developer.

The next pricing model is fixed price and it’s great for projects for business owners with projects because you know how much it will cost going in. You have set expectations on on the cost and the project should not exceed the cost there. There are two kinds of fixed project costs, however. There is fixed price/fixed scope and there is just fixed price.

Typically, a fixed price will benefit those in simple projects where the expectations are very clear and there is not a lot of gray area. This is going to entail really simple website design website and development where the output has some thing to copy or to mimic and the process can be repeated from one side to the next. At this point, it is easy to see that the company designing the website understands what to do. The owner receiving the website is clear and has clear expectation. The company building knows how much they will get paid, the business owner knows how much they will spend, and everyone will agree to this. 

As things get more complex, and fixed price fixed scope tends to work a little better. This is the same idea, however we are writing up an agreement so that all that will be done is included in a statement of work or project scope. This takes out any gray area of exactly what will be done. This greatly helps the development team to price the project fairly and it gives the business owner peace of mind knowing exactly what will go in the scope. The downside of this is overly complex projects do not lend itself well for the business owner to understand the entirety of the scope. Scopes can become long, complex, and without being trained to think of the project from end to end, that things will either get left out or be uncertain within the scope. Choosing this model is still great if there is a lot of communication and the scope is understood and clearly articulated to both parties. Often diagrams drawings renderings that sort of thing can help make the scope better. 

The final pricing model to touch on his value pricing.The developer and business owner agree to how valuable the project is and land on a price that work well for both parties. Theoretically, this is the best pricing model for both parties because it is not based on the side of deliverables but based on the project outcome or the results. The downside of this pricing model is or can be the expense and to the business owner and the level of difficulty of proving the value for the service. Additionally, the service provider cannot always guarantee the results nor do they have the capability to affect all of the outcomes. It is likely that, when building a website the there are other factors that will go into its success. For example the service provider may not be agreeing to market the website with ads or some other strategy yet the entire value that the website could provide is only contingent onThe level of traffic. The conversion rate is controllable yet the traffic to get up to the number to increase in and control that our ROI might not be controllable or the service provider might not be the best fit to control it.

What we have found is a mix of pricing models tends to work best. We prefer a fixed price with a fixed scope where we focus on over communicating and articulating the outcome that we expect. This allows us to blend the value based pricing model with a fixed price and get better results. It is best to understand the pricing model because as a business owner you do not have indefinite funds and picking the right one can greatly impact your return on your investment and what you consider success toward the project. We are transparent with our pricing models, we discuss this with you, and we are very clear on our scopeI understanding the results that you are trying to achieve. It is free for a consultation so reach out and take the next step to see which pricing works best for you.