Every consultant I know charges hourly. It's the industry standard. It's also, I think, the wrong answer for small businesses.
When you charge hourly, the client is buying uncertainty. They don't know what they're going to spend, which makes them risk-averse, which makes the engagement smaller and more cautious than it should be. They monitor your time, you pad your time, and neither side trusts the other.
We price every Build fixed. Same scope, same price, regardless of how long it takes us to deliver it.
This costs us, sometimes. The first Quote Generator we built for a freight forwarder took twice as long as we'd estimated because the rate sheets were in a custom format we'd never seen. We absorbed the cost.
But the upside is enormous. The client commits without anxiety. They scope ambitious instead of cautious. They tell other small business owners about the price (because it's a single, memorable number), which fuels word-of-mouth.
And — this is the bit nobody talks about — fixed pricing forces us to get better. Every Build we ship makes the next Build cheaper for us to deliver. The library of patterns grows. Margins improve.
Hourly pricing punishes efficiency. Fixed pricing rewards it. For a studio that wants to ship more, faster, for smaller businesses — fixed is the only answer.