On the question I never quite want to answer

Someone asked me for a rate card this week, very politely, the way people ask for the wifi password, and I felt that little flinch I always feel and then a flash of guilt about the flinch. It is a reasonable thing to want, because you are about to spend real money with a stranger on the internet and you would like a number before you get emotionally involved. And yet every time I sit down to write the figure my hand stops, because I know something the person asking cannot know yet, which is that I have no idea what they actually need, and neither, usually, do they.

The honest reason I keep prices off the packages is that a website is not a product with a shelf and a barcode, it is a question in disguise. One founder wants a clean single page that makes them look real by the time they meet an investor on Monday. The next person says the same words, asks for a landing page, and it turns out they mean bookings and payments and a way for their assistant to update opening hours without calling me. If I print one figure I am either quietly overcharging the first person for the reassurance of a menu, or I am silently shaving corners on the second so the number still holds, and I do not want to build with a corner already shaved before we have even spoken.

So instead of a price list there is a call, and the call is mostly me being nosy in the gentlest way I can manage. I want to know what this is really for, who has to be able to change it after I hand it over, and where the money or the enquiry actually lands on the day it works. I am not performing discovery at you, I genuinely need to know, because the difference between a two page brochure and a thing that quietly runs part of your business is the whole quote, and it tends to hide inside the answers people give me almost as an afterthought.

I will admit there is ego tangled in it too. A menu makes me one of forty tabs open, compared on a figure that means nothing without the work behind it, and some stubborn part of me refuses to be sorted that way. Mostly, though, I would rather look you in the eye and say what your specific problem costs than hand you a laminated card that lies to both of us. The trade I make in return is that you are not walking into a fog, because you get the number before I start anything, in writing, and it does not drift while we work. If the scope changes because you decide midway that you want the booking system after all, we talk about it before a single new thing gets built, and you say yes with your eyes open or you say no, so there is no scope creep and no strange doubled invoice at the end. The uncertainty stays mine to carry on the call, rather than yours to discover at the finish.