How I keep SaaS projects within budget

The power of fixed-price projects

First off, and this is the main point - I offer all of my projects on a fixed price. I do not offer hourly or daily billing for new MVPs, roadmaps, or full-blown SaaS projects.

Now, a lot of my competitors (and I'm not meaning to talk down to them) use hourly and daily billing. They'll give you an estimate, and that's very different from a quote. Quite importantly different.

Because you know, an estimate is exactly what the word says - it's an estimate. It's not a guarantee.

The problem with estimates

They might say "yeah, it's gonna take 200 hours at this amount per hour". It seems very attractive at first. But then you reach the end of that budget and you're not quite as far as you thought you'd be. Things they said would take a couple of days actually took five or ten, and your budget just gets blown out of the water.

Luckily, that doesn't happen with fixed-price projects. It is fixed to protect you, the buyer, but also from my side as well. We know exactly what we're working towards from the start.

Making fixed pricing work

The only downside with fixed price is that sometimes it's hard to know exactly what we're gonna need until we get started - until you start seeing the project being built. Fixed-price projects do need a decent amount of scope in order for the price to be accurate.

That's why I also offer a roadmap service. It's an exploratory exercise where we look at:

• What are you looking to build?
• What does the system need to have?
• Which features are we gonna include?
• What things are we gonna leave out?

We go through everything in lots and lots of detail. From there, we can work out a more accurate price.

The bottom line

Here's the thing - even with a roadmap, hourly billing and daily billing can still be really hard to know exactly how long something is going to take.

But in essence, that's how I keep SaaS projects within budget: by giving a quote, not an estimate.

When you work with me, you get certainty. You know what you're paying, you know what you're getting, and you can plan your business accordingly. No surprises, no budget blowouts, just transparent, predictable pricing that lets you focus on growing your business.