What we build, and what it's actually like to work with us.

Every project is fixed-scope and fixed-price, and you get the number in writing before you commit to anything. There's no hourly rate and no change-order game.

What we won't do is print a price range on a web page, because the honest range is wide enough to be useless. A five-page launch site and a store with eight hundred products aren't the same job in any respect. What we'll do is give you a real number fast. Tell us roughly what you have in mind and what you were expecting to spend, and if those two things aren't in the same postcode we'll say so on the first reply rather than the fourth meeting.

That's the right question and we would rather answer it here than hope you don't ask.

The studio is early. There's no wall of client logos, and we haven't invented one. What there is instead is this site, which is built to exactly the standard the work is sold on and publishes its own measurements: the slowest a page took to appear across sixty runs, the accessibility results, the number of pages that still work with JavaScript switched off. Every one of those numbers has an automated test behind it that fails when it stops being true. You can open the /work page and read what each decision cost as well as what it bought.

It is a smaller claim than a portfolio and a harder one to fake. If you need a studio that has already done your exact project twice, we're genuinely not it yet, and there's no hard feeling in that.

We're a small studio, and small here means the person who replies to your first email is the person who draws the layouts and writes the code. Nothing is handed to a design team and then over a wall to a build team, because there's no wall.

The practical effect is that a decision made in week one survives into the build, and a problem that surfaces in development gets solved by somebody who already knows why the design is the way it is. The practical cost is that we can only run a few projects at a time, which is why the calendar is worth asking about early.

We scope a launch site at four to six weeks from kickoff. A store is three to eight depending on the catalogue. A redesign is four to ten, because the first fortnight goes on working out what the existing site is actually doing. Those are the numbers we commit to in writing. They aren't an average of past jobs, because the studio is early enough that an average would be a small sample dressed up as a pattern.

The thing that moves those dates is almost never the design or the build. It's the content. If the copy, the photography, and the product information have to be produced while the site is being made, add time, and we'll tell you that on day one instead of at week five.

Then we find out in week one instead of week six, which is the entire reason the process is shaped the way it is.

You are in the work while it happens rather than at a presentation at the end of it. We build in the browser early, with your real content, and you see it as it goes. By the time there's anything that could be called a final review, there should be no surprises left in it, only decisions about small things.

If it turns out the whole direction is wrong, we redraw it. We would rather do that than defend it, and week one is cheap.

Less than you would expect, and earlier than you would like.

One person who can make a decision. An honest account of what the business does and who it's for. Whatever content already exists, however rough. And a real answer to the question of what you want somebody to do after they read the site. If that answer is "be impressed", we'll push back, kindly, because that isn't something a page can be built toward.

We write copy as part of the work. You won't be handed an empty template and asked to fill it in.

You own the code, the assets, the accounts, and the documentation, and we hand all of it over in a state where you can run it without us. A site that needs a phone call to change a headline is a site we have built badly.

We stay close for the first two weeks, because launch is when real people start testing it. After that, ongoing stewardship is available and is entirely optional. Plenty of clients shouldn't buy it, and we'll say so.

When you need it live in ten days. When you need somebody on Slack all day every day. When the site has to be editable by fourteen people across four departments. When what you actually want is a template configured well, which is a completely reasonable thing to want and much cheaper than us.

We will tell you if it's one of these on the first reply, and point you somewhere better. That costs us a project and saves you a quarter.