×
![Modal Image]()
Amplified helps build startups to make our clients’ work easier and more efficient. We want to help you build something new so that you can share it with the world. An essential part of working with you is how we will bill you for your project. While many developers charge a fixed cost, we do things a little differently, so we can provide better service that aligns with our values.
At Amplified, we bill our clients hourly, instead of according to a fixed cost arrangement. Although we do provide an estimate of how many hours your project will likely take, we find that flexibility of hourly billing is more beneficial for us, our client, and our working relationship.
Flexibility when changes come up: hourly billing allows us to handle change requests in the project as we go. With most software projects, changes are inevitable, and remaining flexible is vital to the success of the project.
Establishing trust: in a fixed-price arrangement, these change requests would prompt a renegotiation of the contracted price. Renegotiation can lead to a breakdown in trust between the two parties, as the client may feel we were dishonest with our initial price.
Dealing with bugs: in the process, there may be disagreements as to what qualifies as a bug. A client often expects the application to “just work,” but a vendor may look at the described behavior for a particular feature and interpret that as a new requirement that wasn’t previously communicated. This would lead to a change request, which once again will prompt a renegotiation of the price.
Delivering quality work: in a fixed-price engagement, the vendor has an incentive to cut corners. They may skimp on the testing and debugging phase, under-document and under-notate the code, or the underlying code base may not be as clean as expected. The product may “work” per se, but would not be as robust, performant, or friendly to future developers as it otherwise could be.
Hourly billing permits us to build a high-trust, and high-performing relationship with our clients. Just as hiring X team to work over Y period of time, hourly billing allows you to have a mobilized team you can adjust priorities and requirements with, without worrying about disturbing the contractual relationship with the team. You’ll get a better working process and a better end result.
One of our primary values is honesty at all times. To that end, we report our hours through tracking apps on a weekly basis so that clients have consistent visibility into our work. We also invoice every other week, at the end of each sprint.
That said, we still provide estimates throughout a project. Estimation is useful to create budgetary alignment with the client, to thoroughly process the requirements for a project and force ourselves to consider nuances and edge cases, and to set internal goals for the team. Since software is hard to estimate, it’s important to track the actual hours worked and bill for those.
(If you ask for more frequent reporting, we will gladly oblige. However, keep in mind it adds time to the project planner.)
This process provides transparency, so that clients are never caught off-guard by our reported hours. If they feel like a certain contributor is trending too high, or too low, on a given task or in a given week, we can intervene early on and try to make adjustments.
Hourly billing and our meticulous reporting ensure you receive personalized, top-quality service, and keeps you in the loop throughout the whole process. We have your best interests in mind to gain your trust and achieve the best outcome possible.
