# INTERNAL ONLY — pricing and negotiation notes ## The three options and their real cost Rate used: roughly $475-500 per day of work. Modest for full-stack + data + infrastructure against a fixed deadline, and defensible line by line. **A. Go Live — $5,000 (9.5 days)** design-light incl. logo/colours/fonts 1.5 · crawlable product pages 3 · coverage activation + fresh crawls + QA 1.5 · production environment 2 · quality and launch pass 1.5 **B. Go Live and Get Found — $8,500 (17.25 days)** A, plus: structure proposal 1 · airport pages 2 · brand pages, leading brands 2.5 · mega menu 0.75 · articles 1 · prominence changes 0.5 **C. The Full Launch — $11,000 (23.25 days)** B, plus: two product types 2 · awards strategy + implementation 2 · email capture 0.75 · sponsor slots 0.75 · extended brand browse 0.5 Calendar available 1-18 Sep is 14 working days. A fits comfortably. B is tight but real. C is only survivable with the tooling and if dependencies land on time. If C is chosen, hold the 8 Sep content cut-off absolutely. ## The lever that lands B rather than A Mark is in the room and asked for brand pages, airport pages and a mega menu. Option A contains none of them. So: "A gets you live, branded and crawlable. What it does not do is give search engines pages to rank, which is exactly what Mark asked for. B is the option that answers his review." That makes B the natural choice without you arguing for your own upsell, and it keeps Mark an ally: his recommendations become the reason for the middle tier. ## Floors - **A is the floor.** $5,000 for 9.5 days is already your thin end. Do not discount A. If he wants under $5,000, remove the fresh full collection and ship on existing data, or decline. - Never discount the same scope. Move him down a tier instead, so the link between scope and price is established for every later phase. - If he asks for "B but at A's price", the answer is A plus one named item, priced: airport pages at $1,000, brand pages at $1,500, articles at $600. A la carte is your friend here. ## Anchoring against the $1,500 PoC Expect it. Say it once, calmly, then move on: "That week proved the idea works. This is production: public, findable, branded, on real infrastructure I then run for you. Different job." ## The monthly $250/mo from launch, down from the $300 I first drafted, still five times the development arrangement. His own words give you the opening: "understand there are long term hosting costs coming". If he pushes, $200/mo with support billed separately, but never bundle unlimited support with this client given his idea velocity. ## Getting paid The 50% deposit before work starts is the most important term in the document. Target it with the signed option by 3 Sep so week one is not at risk. ## Schedule risks 1. Articles late. Highest probability. The 8 Sep hard cut-off exists for this. 2. Font licensing. Brandon Grotesque is commercial. No licence, no stalling: use a close free substitute and say so plainly. 3. Brand images. His 7-10 day lead will likely slip. The site already degrades gracefully without them. 4. Mark's structure feedback arriving late. "Silence is approval" covers you. 5. Scope creep by conversation. Every new idea becomes a board card with a scope chip, not free work in this phase. ## On the numbers being lower than they should be A at $5,000 is honest work at a thin rate; B at $8,500 is fair; C at $11,000 is still below what an agency would quote for a public launch with new infrastructure. You are buying a long relationship and a reference, and the recurring fee plus the later phases (accounts, monetisation, the global database) are where the real money sits. Just do not let the thin rate become the reference price for those phases: the a la carte numbers above exist so each future ask has a price attached from the start.