Your Software Invoice Says 40 Hours. What Did You Actually Get?
You open the monthly invoice from your software team. $8,000. Forty hours. The line items say things like "API integration - 6 hrs," "bug investigation - 3 hrs," "database optimization - 4 hrs." You have no way to evaluate any of it.
Was the API integration actually six hours of work? Could it have been done in two? Is "bug investigation" three hours of focused troubleshooting or three hours of Googling? You'll never know. And that's not because your developer is dishonest. It's because the pricing model makes honesty irrelevant.
The Problem with Hourly Billing
Hourly billing has a structural flaw that nobody talks about: slow is profitable.
A developer who hand-codes a solution over two days makes twice as much as one who automates it in 20 minutes. The incentive isn't to work efficiently. It's to fill hours. And when you're buying time instead of output, the person selling it has no reason to work faster.
There's an information asymmetry problem too. You can evaluate a finished product. You can tell if a feature works, if a report pulls the right data, if the system runs faster. But you can't evaluate the hours that went into it. "Database optimization - 4 hrs" could mean anything. You're trusting the invoice because you have to, not because you can verify it.
Hours tell you how long someone sat at a computer. They don't tell you what got done.
AI Made Hourly Billing Even More Broken
AI-assisted development changed the math. Tasks that took a developer eight hours two years ago now take two. Code generation tools write boilerplate in seconds. Bug fixes that required hours of debugging get resolved in minutes with AI-assisted diagnostics.
So what goes on the invoice?
Most agencies use AI internally but still bill by the hour. They're not going to tell you the task took 90 minutes when they can bill for six. The efficiency gap between what AI enables and what shows up on your timesheet is where your money disappears.
We use AI openly. Our developers direct it, review everything it produces, and test before anything ships. But we don't think you should pay for eight hours when two hours of work actually happened. Which is why we stopped billing hours entirely.
What Output-Based Pricing Looks Like
We use delivery credits. A credit is a unit of completed work, sized by complexity. A 1-credit task is a config change or small bug fix. A 5-credit task is a meaningful feature. A 13-credit task is a major build.
Here's the difference. Under hourly billing, you might get an invoice that says "CRM weekly report - 6 hrs, $1,200." Under credits, you'd see "automated weekly sales summary email to manager - 5 credits." The price is fixed before work starts. If we finish faster because we used AI, you pay the same. The efficiency benefits you, not us.
Five credits also got one of our clients an automated certification expiry system. Their scheduling platform now flags when a staff member's certification expires within 30 days and notifies the ops manager with the employee name, cert type, and expiration date. Same complexity, same price, completely different industry.
What's inside a credit that never shows up on a timesheet? A project manager translating business needs into technical tasks. Architecture decisions from 20 years of building production systems. QA testing. Error monitoring. Documentation. These are real costs that hourly billing either hides in inflated hours or skips entirely.
Estimates Are Commitments
When we quote 8 credits for a task, that's the price. If it turns out to be a 13-credit effort because we underestimated the complexity, you still pay 8. We absorb the difference.
Last quarter we scoped a reporting feature at 5 credits. Halfway through, a database migration we didn't anticipate added complexity. Final effort was closer to 8 credits of work. The client paid 5. We ate 3. About $570 out of our pocket, not theirs.
That's the incentive structure working correctly. We lose money when we estimate poorly. So we estimate carefully.
Bugs in our work get fixed at no additional cost. Every task gets documented acceptance criteria before work starts, so there's no gray area about what was agreed to. And meetings, emails, Slack messages, and project coordination are all free. Credits only get used when software ships.
The Math That Matters
A mid-level developer costs $90-130k in salary. Add benefits, payroll taxes, equipment, and management overhead and you're looking at $120-170k per year. That gets you one person who needs managing, can only work on one thing at a time, takes vacation, and might leave in six months.
Our Build plan at $11,400 per month ($136,800/yr) gets you a project manager, access to multiple developers, AI-accelerated delivery, QA, monitoring, and zero HR overhead. A team for the cost of one hire.
If you're paying a part-time freelancer $100-150 per hour to maintain a system they didn't build, run the numbers on what you're actually spending. The Sustain plan at $5,700/mo often costs less and delivers more, because you get a team, a dedicated PM, and someone proactively managing your system instead of just reacting to tickets.
For the Skeptics
If you've been through a failed build, an offshore engagement that fell apart, or a vendor who disappeared with your source code, you don't need a sales pitch. You need proof that the next engagement will be different.
That's why we built credits with fixed estimates where we absorb overruns, code ownership from day one with full repository access, and no lock-in with 30 days notice to cancel. Your code, your documentation, your deployment configs. If you walk away, you take everything with you.
Skepticism is earned. We're not asking you to trust us because we say so. We're asking you to look at how the model actually works.
Stop Paying for Time. Start Paying for Results.
If you're tired of invoices that measure time instead of output, let's talk. We'll look at what you're building, what you're spending, and whether delivery credits make sense for your situation. If they don't, we'll tell you that too.
Or just tell us what you're working on. Sometimes the right first step is a conversation, not a commitment.
Want to see the full credit scale and plan details? Check out our delivery credit plans. Have specific questions? Read the FAQ.