Every agency offers a free discovery call. We charge $1,500 for a 72-hour audit instead, and founders sometimes ask why. The short answer: a free call buys you a guess. The audit buys you a document you can hold us to.
What a free call actually produces
Forty-five minutes of conversation, a rough range, and a proposal written to win the deal rather than describe the work. The number goes up once the build starts and the "unknowns" turn out to have been knowable all along. Nobody lied; nobody did the work of finding out.
What the audit produces
Three days of real engineering time. We read your spec, your designs if you have them, and your backend if one exists. You get back a written scope: every screen, the data model, the integrations, the risks we see, a fixed price, and a ship date. If we think the idea does not fit a 30-day native build, we say so in writing and explain what would.
Why charging for it is the honest option
Paying for the audit means you get our full attention instead of a sales pitch, and it means we can afford to tell you no. The $1,500 is credited against the build if you go ahead. If you do not, the scope is yours to take to anyone, and it will save you money there too.
The real cost of $0
The cheapest quote is almost never the cheapest project. A scope that was never written gets renegotiated in week three, when you have the least leverage. We would rather have the hard conversation on day one, with a document in front of both of us.