Software Estimates Die on Unknowns
Every blown software quote tells the same post-mortem: the number was built on assumptions the client didn’t share and the developer didn’t ask. The “simple app” with enterprise single sign-on. The data migration everyone silently assumed was included. The integration with a vendor API documented in three languages, none of them helpful. The quote wasn’t wrong because the work was estimated badly — it was wrong because the work was never properly seen.
This form exists to see the work first. It captures the technical dimensions that decide cost, and — its most valuable feature — gives both sides a graceful path when the honest answer is “we don’t know yet.”
The Dimensions That Set the Price
Five facts fix the cost of most software projects:
- Users and scale. Seats, expected traffic, data volumes — number fields. Ten users and ten thousand are different architectures pretending to share a quote.
- Where it lives. Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid — a multiple choice that decides infrastructure before a line of code is priced.
- What it must talk to. The integration list: payment providers, finance systems, legacy databases, that one SaaS tool the leadership team loves. Every integration is scope, and unnamed integrations are the favorite way quotes die.
- What comes across. Migration: how much data, from where, in what condition. “Bring everything” and “start clean” are different projects.
- The support expectation. Response times, maintenance, uptime — the service-level conversation, held before the contract instead of during the first outage.
The Honest Path When Scope Doesn’t Exist
Half of inquiries arrive as “we need something like X, roughly.” The form’s most important branch handles it: when the client can’t answer the fundamentals, the structured questions yield to an offer — a paid discovery phase at a fixed price, producing the specification the real quote will be built from. Quoting discovery is easy, honest, and profitable; quoting fantasy scope is none of those. The long text field captures the client’s vision either way, and a yes/no gate routes it to the right process.
From Submission to Estimate
Technical answers flow to the dev lead’s queue via webhooks; each submission pings the studio through a self notification. More technical-sale formats sit in the IT collection and the technology category.
Frequently Asked Questions
Fixed price or time and materials?
Fixed for discovery phases and tightly specified builds; time and materials for the genuinely exploratory. The form’s answers tell you which project you’re looking at — that’s their real job.
What's the most commonly underestimated item?
Data migration, consistently. Ask what “bring everything across” includes and the answer is usually “we’ll figure it out” — exactly the phrase that turns a two-week line item into a two-month surprise.
Should clients see technical questions at all?
The form translates: “cloud or your own servers,” not “deployment topology.” Clients can answer plain-language versions of technical questions — and their answers reveal which ones need an engineer’s follow-up.
How detailed should the integration list be?
Named systems, not categories — “accounting” is not an answer; “the finance platform with custom reporting” is. The difference in scoping effort is the difference between a week and a quarter.