Why we don't bill you until your software is live

Every custom software quote tells you how much. Very few tell you when you start paying, and what will exist on the day you do.

That second question is worth asking every vendor you talk to, us included, because the answer shows who carries the risk if the project never gets as far as a working launch.

Three ways software gets paid for

The traditional agency model asks for a large deposit before anything exists, with later payments tied to documents and project phases rather than to working software. If the project goes off course, the money's already spent. That's a big part of why so many failing projects get pushed through to a launch nobody believes in. Once you've paid that much, stopping feels worse than carrying on.

Hourly billing starts in the first hour. Plenty of good people work this way, and for a small, well-defined job it's a perfectly fair arrangement. But it puts the risk of a bad estimate on you. If the work takes longer than anyone guessed, and with software it usually does, the extra time shows up on your invoice.

We do it differently. Our monthly fee starts when the first version of your software is live and your team is using it for real work. Nothing is billed at the first call, at the demo, or while we're building.

What that changes in practice

This is mostly about who carries the risk, and that changes how both sides behave.

If a project never gets to a working launch, we've absorbed the cost of building it. Clients are usually the ones asked to carry that risk, and it sits better with us, since we're the ones in control of the work. It also means a slow build costs us rather than you. Every extra week is our expense, so you don't have to wonder whether the pace is honest.

It changes what "done" means, too. A vendor paid against a written specification has every reason to call the job finished once the specification is met. We get paid when your team is running real work through the system, which is the finish line you care about.

And it affects which projects we take on. We can only afford to build things we believe will launch. A vendor who bills during the build can keep a doomed project going for months. We can't, so if something shouldn't be built, we'll tell you in the first hour, when hearing it costs you nothing.

What we ask in return

A sensible skeptic would ask how we make this work. It works because our plans run on a 12-month commitment, and that term starts at launch too, along with the first invoice. No clock is running while we build. We can afford to carry the cost of the build because what follows is a year of working together, hosting and improving the software. If you're after a two-week project, this arrangement isn't right for you, and neither are we.

The one exception

Unusually large systems, and older systems that need replacing, sometimes start with a short paid discovery phase. When that's the case, we say so before anything is signed, not after. Estimating a rebuild of a twenty-year-old system from a demo call gives you a guess. Looking through the real system first gives you a figure you can plan around. The findings are yours either way, whoever you hire to act on them.

Three questions for any vendor

Whoever you're talking to, these are worth asking.

• When does billing start, and what exists on that day? A working system your team uses is one answer. A signed statement of work is a very different one.
• If this project falls apart halfway through, what will I have paid, and what will I own? The second part matters as much as the first, and we covered it in who owns the code.
• Who decides when the build is done? If the answer is a document rather than your team using the software, any gap between the two is your risk.

Our whole process, from the first call to a working demo in about a week and on to launch, is laid out on how it works, including the point where billing starts. We'd rather that be written down on the page than left to a sales conversation. If you have a quote on your desk right now, try these questions on it, and bring it to a call if you'd like a second opinion. That call is free either way.