“The Economics are Wonky”

Have you gotten a proposal and noticed the rate cards don’t make sense?

"We're not longer billing by hours ... you have to start billing by expertise and billing by results." - Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits

Let me explain… what used to cost six-figures is now coming in at five-figures. Five-figures at four. Everything is dropping an order of magnitude.

Do you see it on the delivery side? If you paid less, then you can generally expect the velocity to extend - ask a previous client who's other agency took 16 months to deliver what should've taken 6 weeks. But that's what you get when you pay in pennies.

We flipped it - 12 weeks of work in 4.

Some clients I know are on the “favor”-plan (love you guys xoxo) - we don’t even discuss rates. It’s just here’s the feature, here's the upgrade, here’s the bill (yes it went down.)

Everything is shifting HARD to value-pricing and estimations. Which is GOOD if you’re still budget-conscious but can look TOO GOOD to be true.

I had a startup client ask me “is this accurate?” and I just shrugged. Months are weeks, weeks are days. Why?

I could explain it… spec-driven development guardrails the agents. Agentic Harnesses magnify the team output. Rapid prototyping makes the iteration cycles of CAT hours not days. Code review bots monitor (not including linting, automated testing, etc.) code quality.

Agent tokenomics is also a factor.

When the eyes glaze I know when to stop talking.

“Focus on the business growth, talk to your customers, add a “0” and we’ll manage the product”, I say.

No one knows how Santa does it all in one night but I’ve a few theories.

Note: Hand-written w/o AI.

- Dom

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