Walk into any NYC agency in 2026 and the rate card starts at $200/hr for "senior production," $275 for design lead, $350 for partner time. Look reasonable on paper. Then count the hours.
Why hourly is the agency's friend, not yours
Hourly transfers scope risk. Every "let's just hop on a quick call" is billable. Every revision is billable. Every Slack message thread is billable. By the time your landing page goes live, the agency has logged 65 hours and you've paid $14,000 for what should have been a 35-hour project.
What 35 hours of work actually looks like
- 5 hours — strategy, messaging, positioning.
- 10 hours — design across hero, sections, mobile.
- 15 hours — code, animations, integrations, performance.
- 3 hours — SEO, schema, sitemap, analytics.
- 2 hours — launch, DNS, monitoring.
At a fair senior rate of $100/hr offshore-equivalent, that's $3,500. The flat-fee studio version is $260–$500 because operations are lean and there's no agency layer.
How to tell which model you're being sold
- Hourly tells: "rough estimate," "approximate timeline," ranges of $5,000–$20,000.
- Flat-fee tells: fixed price, fixed launch date, fixed scope document signed at the start.
Flat-fee isn't always right. For ongoing rolling work or experimental scopes, hourly can fit. But for a known deliverable — landing page, marketing site, MVP — flat-fee is the only honest model in 2026.
Send your scope and we'll send a flat quote and launch date in 24 hours. No "discovery call" needed first.