Why we sell a live product, not hours of work

Anyone who has hired development by the hour knows the feeling. Every meeting becomes a cost. Every delay becomes a bigger invoice. And the question that matters, “how much will it cost to go live?”, has no answer until the end.

In January 2026, Webflow published an account by Anshey Bhatia, of US agency Verbal+Visual, on the decision to stop selling hours. The numbers he shares help explain why, at the Studio, we sell live products at a fixed price.

What Verbal+Visual changed

Bhatia says he'd known for years that the hourly model was broken. In his view, it rewarded slowness, not results, and put the project's risk on the client instead of the agency. The turning point came at a SoDA conference in Copenhagen in September 2024.

The agency created Commerce+, a fixed-price offering. Instead of billing hours per task, it sells programs with predefined products, each with described deliverables and goals. The comparison he uses is a ride-hailing app: the price is agreed before the ride starts, and the client doesn't watch the meter.

What happened to the numbers

According to Bhatia, the close rate on new business from qualified leads rose from about 21% to about 45%.

He's also honest about the cost. Project margins fell about 7% in the first year, which the agency treats as a learning cost, expecting to recover and beat the old margin in year two. And he admits the first version got things wrong: some clients found the menu too big and froze on the choice; others didn't understand what each product included. His conclusion is that the next evolution “isn’t more complexity, it’s more clarity.”

The market context is in the piece too. According to SoDA's Agency Outlook 2026 study, cited by Bhatia, 51% of agencies say competition has reduced their pricing power, 43% report lower margins and 60% are rethinking their business model.

Why hours are the wrong model if you want a live product

I see three problems with the hourly model, all from the founder's point of view:

1. The risk sits with whoever controls the least. The vendor decides how it works, who it puts on the project and how long it takes. The client pays for every extra hour.
2. The incentive points the wrong way. The longer the project takes, the more the vendor bills. Nobody has to act in bad faith for that to matter.
3. AI made the math worse. Bhatia opens his piece with this: the client watches a tool write a paragraph in seconds and asks why the agency doesn't deliver in half the time. If the work got faster, billing by the hour means billing for what the tool saved. If AI writes the code, what are you paying for?

What the founder wants to buy isn't people's time. It's the product working, with users, on a known date.

What changes with a fixed price

A fixed price isn't a discount. It's a shift in responsibility. Whoever delivers now carries the risk of delays and rework. For that to work, three things need to exist:

• Discovery before price. You can't fix a price without understanding the problem. Discovery replaces the guess with scope.
• Written scope. What's in, what's out, in screens and flows. Mid-project changes are possible, with an amendment.
• Deadline in the contract. A written date, not an estimate.

Bhatia describes the internal effect: without the stopwatch, the team focuses on quality and uses AI as an accelerator, not a threat to margin. It makes sense. If the price is fixed, every hour saved is efficiency, not lost revenue.

What this means for you

If you're hiring someone to launch your product, compare proposals with these questions:

• What's the total price, from start to launch? A range of hours isn't an answer. See how much a custom web system costs.
• What's the date, and is it in the contract?
• What's out of scope? A proposal that cuts nothing is promising things it doesn't control.
• What happens if it's late? Who pays the difference.
• Did the price come before or after they understood the problem?

An hourly proposal can look cheaper on paper. But only on paper do you know the total on the day you sign.

How we do it at the Studio

We sell live products, not hours. Discovery comes first. Then a fixed price and a deadline written into the contract. Design and code sit on the same team, so the deadline is realistic.

Two cases show what this means in practice. LCX, a travel company operating in more than 10 countries in South America, had one system per country and moved to a single system, live in 29 days. AI Vou Eu, an AI travel SaaS, went live in 4 weeks with the Studio.

If you want to know the price and date of your SaaS before you start, our custom system and SaaS development service starts with discovery.