Why we don't promise to fix everything
A proposal to fix every finding for one price sounds safe. It rarely is. We fix the price and the hours, put every issue in priority order, and report every task, done or not. Why that is the more honest deal, and what protects you in it.
After an audit, the proposal most people expect reads like this: “We will fix all 47 findings for this price.” It sounds like the safe choice. Everything is covered, and the number is known.
We don’t make that offer. Ours says: a fixed price, 80 hours, your issues in priority order, and we get as far as the time allows. Here is why we think that is the better deal for you.
What “fix everything” turns into
Nobody knows how deep each finding goes until someone opens the code. A vendor who promises all of them for one price has three ways to survive that:
- Pad the price, so the surprises are paid for in advance, by you.
- Cut corners, so each finding is closed on paper. The title was “fixed”; nobody checked that it helped.
- Reopen the deal, with a change request the first time something is harder than expected.
In all three the list gets treated as 47 equal items, which it never is.
Three things, and you can fix two
Any piece of work has a price, a time and a scope. Fix all three in advance and one of them will quietly give. We fix the price and the time, and we are open about the third: the scope is as much of the list as the hours allow, starting from the top.
Why the order matters more than the count
In a real audit, a few issues carry most of the value. The page that gets a third of your visits and can’t be found on a phone matters more than twenty missing descriptions. When the list is ranked by what each issue is worth, the first hours are the most valuable ones, and the last items are often worth little.
So “did you fix everything?” matters less than “did the hours go to what was worth the most?”
What protects you
- The list is agreed before we start. You see the order, and you can change it.
- Every task is reported, done or not done. Nothing disappears from the list because it was inconvenient.
- The pending items stay yours, in order, with what we learned about each one.
- The price doesn’t move. A task that takes longer than expected costs you nothing extra. It means we get less far down the list, and you can see exactly how far.
“As far as time allows” is not vague
It would be vague if the order were hidden. With the list in the open, you know at every moment what is being worked on, what comes next and what will be left. A proposal that promises everything usually can’t tell you that.
The first month works this way. If more is worth doing afterwards, the same list continues.
Questions for any fixed-price proposal
- What happens when a task takes three times longer than planned?
- In what order will the work be done, and who decided it?
- How will I know a fix worked, not only that it was closed?
- What do I receive about the things that were not done?
Written from our engineers’ work on production systems. Want a second opinion on your project? Talk to an engineer.
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