What Discovery Produces
By the end you hold four documents:
The specification.
Pages, features, integrations, content model, and acceptance criteria written so that any competent team could build from it. This is the document that makes fixed prices possible.
The architecture decision record.
What we’d build with and why, including the options we rejected and the reasons. No inherited mysteries.
The fixed quote.
A price and a delivery date we commit to our S³ standard: On Time × On Spec × On Budget.
The risk register.
What could complicate the build, stated before you commit rather than discovered after.
What it costs, and how the credit works
Why we charge for it
Free discovery is a sales process wearing a hard hat
Its real deliverable is a proposal designed to win your signature, which is why the scope it defines so often dissolves once the contract is signed.
Charging changes the incentive
Our Discovery has one client you and its deliverable has to survive contact with any builder you show it to. That’s also why we can put a real price on the build afterwards: we’re pricing a specification, not a guess.
How it runs
| Day(s) | What happens |
|---|---|
| Before | 30-minutes call fit, scope of the Discovery itself, fixed fee confirmed |
| 1–2 | Stakeholder sessions: goals, users, constraints, existing systems |
| 2–6 | Specification and architecture work, with checkpoint reviews |
| 6–10 | Spec walkthrough, fixed quote, risk register, decision |
You see work in progress throughout, no vanishing act followed by a reveal.
Who it’s for
- Buyers comparing agencies who want a real price instead of four incompatible estimates
- Teams that were burned by a discovery-then-rescope experience elsewhere
- Projects with genuine unknowns: migrations, integrations, replatforms see how this fed the Astrak migration
- Boards that need a costed, evidenced document before releasing budget
Book a Discovery call 30 minutes, free we’ll tell you within the call whether Discovery is even necessary. Small, well-understood projects sometimes skip straight to a quote.
Dependable. Delivered.
Frequently Asked Questions
A short, fixed-fee engagement before a build in which the agency produces a detailed specification, architecture recommendation and firm price. It replaces free estimates which are guesses with a priced commitment based on defined scope.
[£X] for most projects, fixed before it starts. The fee credits in full against your build if you proceed with SCube.
Yes, contractually. You can hand it to any supplier. The spec is written to be buildable by a competent third party that’s the test of whether it’s any good.
2–10 working days depending on complexity. The exact length is fixed on the intro call, before you commit.
Then you find out at the cheapest possible moment before the build. The spec lets us re-scope honestly (cut features, not quality) or lets you take a smaller version elsewhere. Either way you decide with real numbers
