Every studio that bills by the hour is quietly betting against itself. The faster you get, the less you earn. The more experience you bring to a problem, the smaller the invoice. Nine years in, we were solving in two days what used to take two weeks, and being paid less for it.
What the hour actually measures
An hour measures attendance, not outcome. It tells a client how long someone sat with their problem, which is the one thing about the engagement they have no reason to care about. It also puts the two parties on opposite sides of the same number: they want fewer hours, we want more, and every conversation about scope becomes a negotiation about time rather than about the work.
Worse, it makes the good version of a project the expensive one. A client who asks for a second round of exploration is asking for a bigger bill, so they stop asking. The work gets narrower exactly where it should get wider.
How a Vantra Studio phase is priced
We agree a fixed fee per phase before the phase starts. Four numbers, four dates, signed once. What sits inside each fee is written plainly:
- Discovery — interviews, audit, positioning, and the written brief everything else is measured against
- Direction — two or three routes, taken far enough to judge, presented in context rather than on a board
- Build — the chosen route drawn out in full, with the components and tokens the team will actually use
- Launch — production files, handover, and the first weeks in market with us still on the file
If a phase takes us longer than planned, that is our problem, not an invoice. If it takes less, the client keeps the difference in scope, not in change.
The only honest way to charge more is to be worth more to the business, not to be slower at the desk.
What changes in the room
Fixed fees change the conversation on day one. Nobody counts revisions. Nobody asks whether a call is billable. The question stops being how much will this cost and becomes is this the right thing to make — which is the question we are actually useful for.
It also forces us to be honest about scope before the work starts. A fixed fee is only safe if the brief is sharp, so the brief gets sharp. Discovery earns its place not because clients enjoy paying for it, but because it is what makes the other three numbers believable.
The part that is harder
We turn down more work than we used to. A project with an undefined shape cannot be priced fixed, and pretending otherwise just moves the risk somewhere it will surface later. When a brief is genuinely unknown, we sell the discovery phase alone and price the rest after — which sometimes means the rest never happens, and that is a fair outcome.
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