A studio that quotes fast looks responsive. It is also how you end up rebuilding the same page three times for free. We now refuse to put a number on anything until we have answers to nine questions, and we say so on the first call.
The nine
- Who signs off? One name. If the answer is a list, the timeline has a problem before it starts.
- What has to be true on launch day for this to have been worth it? The answer is the actual brief.
- What are you measuring now? If nothing, the first deliverable is analytics, not design.
- Where does the content come from? Late copy is the single most common cause of a missed date.
- What already exists? Brand, design system, component library, CMS. Half of estimating is finding out what you do not have to build.
- Who builds it after us? A team that inherits the code needs different handoff than a team that never touches it.
- What did you try before? The failed attempt is usually more informative than the brief.
- What is genuinely fixed? Date, budget or scope — one of the three. Not all three.
- What happens if we do nothing? If the honest answer is "not much", the project will lose to something urgent by week three.
If four of these are unanswerable, we are not quoting a project. We are quoting a guess.
What we do when the answers are missing
We sell a paid discovery week instead. It is small, fixed and produces a scope both sides can price. Clients who hesitate at a discovery week were never going to be happy with a fixed quote built on assumptions — and finding that out for the cost of one week is cheap for everybody.
Every project we ran that went badly, we can trace back to a question on this list that we let slide because the client seemed keen and we wanted the work.