Price the work
Scope it, cost it, quote it — and know the number below which the job loses you money.
What this course is, and what it is not
It is the business side of the work: scoping, costing, quoting, and knowing when to walk away. Every output is something you produce and keep — a scope document, a cost model, a quote.
It is not a promise that you will make money. Nobody can sell you that honestly, and a course that implies otherwise is selling something else. What this can do is stop you underpricing a job, which is the failure that ends most one-person technical businesses long before demand does.
What you'll leave with
- A scope document for one real job, with the exclusions written down.
- A run-cost floor — the monthly figure below which the work costs you money to keep alive.
- A quote you can defend line by line, including the part where you say no.
Before you start
This assumes you can already measure what you build. If you cannot yet say what a system costs to run in tokens, watts and wall-clock, the pricing here will rest on guesses.
Module 0 — Scope and cost
Free. The two documents that decide whether the job is worth taking.
- Write down what you are not doing — A scope is defined by its exclusions. The inclusions are the easy half and everybody writes those. (25 min)
- The floor under your price — What the thing costs to keep alive, every month, after you have been paid. (30 min)
- The quote, and the walk away — Turning the two documents into a number, and recognising the jobs to decline. (25 min, paid)
Related writing
- Work out the cost per run before you quote the job — The arithmetic that stops a fixed-price automation from quietly costing you money every month it keeps running. One formula, four inputs, done on the back of an envelope.
- Local or hosted: where the crossover actually is — The break-even between a GPU you own and an API you rent is a division, not an argument. Here is the calculation, with the terms people leave out.