The question we get most often, after “what’s your hourly rate,” is “what’s the catch with the free discovery?” It’s a fair question. Two weeks of senior engineering time isn’t free for anybody — somebody is paying, and the buyer’s reasonable suspicion is that the cost is going to show up somewhere else later.
The short answer is that we eat the cost, on purpose, because we’ve found it’s a better deal for us than the alternative. Here’s the math.
What discovery actually is
Before any contract is signed, every engagement gets one to two weeks of free working sessions with a Forward Deployed Engineer — the same person who’d be leading the build if we signed. The schedule is roughly:
- A kickoff call. 60 minutes. We align on goals, users, constraints, and the single outcome that defines whether the engagement is a success.
- One or two architecture sessions. We sketch the technical approach, identify the risky parts, and prototype any pieces where the estimate hinges on something we genuinely don’t know yet — a third-party API behavior, an AI accuracy spike, an integration constraint.
- A scope-writing pass. We draft the Scope Agreement — milestones, fixed prices, acceptance criteria, schedule — and send it for review.
If at the end of it you don’t sign, you walk away with the Scope Agreement, an architecture document, and any prototypes we built. Free.
What it costs us
A senior engineer’s loaded cost is something like $200–$300 per hour. A discovery pass usually consumes 30–60 hours of their time — meeting prep, the calls themselves, architecture work, prototyping, scope drafting, internal reviews.
That puts the all-in cost of one discovery, to us, somewhere between $6,000 and $18,000. We don’t recover that cost from the client who signs. We don’t recover it from the client who doesn’t. We absorb it.
Across a year, with the conversion rate we run, the unpaid discovery hours are a real line item on our internal P&L. It’s not free — it’s a marketing and sales cost, the same way a paid ads budget would be.
Why we choose to absorb it
Four reasons, in rough order of importance.
1. It forces us to scope honestly. When discovery is free, we can’t sandbag the estimate. We’ve already burned the hours; quoting a fluffy timeline just to look cheap means losing money on the next phase. The discipline lines up: the only way the math works for us is if the Scope Agreement is tight, and the only way the agreement is tight is if we genuinely understand the problem.
The alternative — billing for discovery — gives consulting firms an incentive to extend discovery, run “phase 1 of 3,” and produce a deck that’s deliberately vague enough to justify the next billable phase. That model is everywhere, and we don’t think it serves the client.
2. It kills bad-fit engagements before either side commits. About 30% of the discovery passes we run end with us recommending the client doesn’t proceed — either with us or at all. Sometimes the project doesn’t make business sense. Sometimes a different shape of firm is a better fit. Sometimes the client realizes they’re trying to build something they actually want to buy.
In all of those cases, we’re better off knowing during discovery than three weeks into a build. The free discovery is a filter on both sides. Paying for it would make both sides reluctant to call off a bad fit.
3. It compresses the sales cycle. A traditional consulting sale takes four to eight calls — qualification, technical scoping, proposal review, contract negotiation, kickoff. Discovery collapses most of that into a working engagement. By the time the Scope Agreement is on the table, the engineer who’d run the build has already been working with the client for two weeks. Trust is built. Edge cases are surfaced. Scope is precise. The signature happens fast or doesn’t happen at all.
4. We learn whether we can actually help. Some problems look like a fit on the marketing site and turn out to be outside what we do well. Discovery is where we find out — before we’ve billed for anything, before either side has any expectation we’ll be involved long-term. The risk asymmetry runs in the client’s favor on purpose.
Why this works for us economically
The unit economics depend on the conversion rate from discovery → signed Scope Agreement. Ours runs around 60–70%, which is high because we screen on the front end. We say no to plenty of inquiries that don’t fit the model. The discoveries we run are usually with people who’ve already done the homework.
At that conversion rate, the absorbed cost of the no-go discoveries is more than covered by the tighter scoping, faster sales cycle, and lower acquisition cost of the discoveries that do sign. The free offer also drives word-of-mouth — a discovery that ended in “we’re not the right team” still produces a written referral when the client lands at a firm we recommended.
It’s a deliberate trade. We make less on the front end. We make more on closing rate, sales-cycle compression, and trust.
Why this works for the client economically
If you sign with us, the cost of discovery is implicitly bundled into the build — it’s our marketing expense, not a line item on your invoice.
If you don’t sign with us, the deliverables you walk away with — a written scope, an architecture document, a fixed-price plan — are worth a real number on the open market. Plenty of firms charge $10–$20k for less detailed versions. You can take ours to a competitor and use it to negotiate. We’ve had it happen. The deal is still net-positive for us, because the next prospect they refer is sometimes worth more than the deal we lost.
The one thing it requires
This whole model only works if we’re willing to walk away from bad fits. A firm that bills for discovery doesn’t have to make that call — every hour is paid. A firm that absorbs the cost has a structural reason to be honest about whether they should be the ones building.
That’s the actual catch, if there is one: discovery sometimes ends with “we’re not the right team for this — here’s who we’d recommend instead.” The free offer is paid for, in part, by the discipline of saying no.
If that’s the kind of conversation you’d like to be in, the contact form is here. If it isn’t, we’re probably not the right team for that either — and discovery is the cheapest way for both of us to find out.