How We Bill · Veles Labs
Pricing — fixed price per job, quoted after a free scoping call. How Veles Labs bills.
Every job quoted on its own scope.
Model
Fixed price, per job
Quoted after
A free 30-min call
Hourly billing
Never
Ownership
Yours, day one
01 — The Principle
We don’t sell packages, because we don’t build the same thing twice.
Tiered pricing works when the product is identical for everyone. Ours never is. A five-page site for a clinic and a five-page site wired into an inventory system share a page count and nothing else — quoting them the same number would mean overcharging one of you and under-building for the other.
So the number comes after the conversation, not before it. You get a free thirty-minute scoping call, we work out what the job actually involves, and you receive one fixed price for the whole build. That figure doesn’t move unless you change what you’re asking for — and if you do, we re-quote before any work starts, not after.
No hourly billing. No surprise invoices. No scope bloat. If a cheaper path gets you the same outcome, we’ll tell you — and if you don’t need the thing at all, we won’t build it.
02 — Where Projects Land
Not a menu. A range, and yours sits somewhere on it.
These describe site and platform work — the one area where enough projects share a shape that publishing a range is genuinely useful. They aren’t packages and there is nothing to select; they exist so you can establish we’re in the same range before either of us spends time on a call. Everything else we do is quoted from zero, and the next section explains why.
We start at $2,000. Below that we couldn’t build something custom, integrated and properly finished — and we’d rather tell you that now than quote you something we wouldn’t put our name on.
01
From $2,000
A complete site, custom-built end to end and integrated with the systems you already run. No templates, no page builders, no theme bought and reskinned. This is the floor, not a stripped-back version of the real thing.
02
$5,000 – $15,000
A full site with a backend behind it — database, accounts, an admin your team actually operates, and the integrations your day-to-day depends on.
03
$15,000 – $50,000
Software rather than a website. Internal tools your team runs its day on, custom workflows, and several systems made to talk to each other properly.
04
$50,000 +
Platforms carrying live operations, where downtime is measured in lost revenue. Multi-tenant systems, real-time data, infrastructure built to hold under load.
03 — Quoted From Zero
Some disciplines have no standard shape.We won’t invent one.
Agents, automation, games and bespoke systems vary so widely between engagements that any published figure would be misleading — two briefs described in identical words routinely differ by an order of magnitude once the work is understood. Rather than print a number we’d have to walk back on the call, we scope these individually, every time.
AI agents & automation
An agent might take over one recurring process or an entire business function. The work scales with how much of your operating logic has to be encoded, how clean and reachable your data already is, and how much human review stays in the loop. That range is far too wide to band.
Game development
A vertical slice and a shipped title are different undertakings. Engine, multiplayer netcode, platform count, art pipeline and post-launch support each move the figure substantially — and most of those are decided after the first prototype is playable, not before.
Bespoke systems
Work that replaces something already running, joins several systems that were never designed to meet, or carries uptime and compliance obligations. Scoped against your actual stack, never against a reference project.
Brand & digital identity
Anything from a single mark to a complete system rolled out across every surface a business touches. Priced by how many of those surfaces it has to hold up on, and whether it’s replacing something or starting clean.
Custom does not mean open-ended. These are still fixed-price, still quoted after the same free scoping call, still re-quoted for your approval before anything changes. The number is built for your job rather than taken off a shelf — it doesn’t move once we’ve both signed off on it.
04 — What Moves The Number
Six things decide what a job costs.
Nothing here is a surprise on an invoice. These are the questions we work through on the call, and they’re what the fixed price is built from.
01
Surface area
How many distinct screens, flows and states actually need designing and building — not page count, but how many genuinely different things there are.
02
Integrations
Every system it has to talk to. Stripe, QuickBooks, Salesforce, your CRM. Each one is real work: auth, error paths, and what happens when the other end goes down.
03
Data & accounts
Whether it needs to remember anything. Logins, stored records, permissions and sync are the line between a website and a system.
04
Design depth
Whether we’re applying an identity you already own or creating one. Building the brand alongside the product is a second discipline, not a detail.
05
Load & stakes
What breaks if it’s slow or down. A site that informs and a system taking live orders get different architecture, testing and monitoring.
06
Timeline
A normal schedule costs what it costs. A compressed one means more people in parallel, and that shows up in the number — we’d rather say so up front.
05 — Getting To A Number
Four steps, and the priceis fixed at the second one.
01
Scoping call
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. What you’re building, what problem it solves, when you need it. If we’re not the right team for it, we say so on this call.
02
Fixed proposal
One number for the whole job, with the scope written down beside it so there’s no ambiguity about what’s included. Timeline committed before a line of code exists.
The price is fixed here
03
Build, with weekly demos
Something you can actually click every week — not a status report. You always know where the project stands and what happens next.
04
Handover
Source code, documentation, design files and deployment access. All of it, on day one of it being yours.
Payment Schedule
Payments release against the work, never the calendar.
Two structures, split at $5,000. You are never invoiced for work you haven’t seen.
Projects from $5,000 — three stages
40%
Scope signed off. Work starts.
40%
A working link you can use yourself.
20%
Source, docs and access transferred.
Under $5,000 — two stages
50%
Scope signed off. Work starts.
50%
Everything transferred. Same ownership terms.
06 — Never On The Invoice
The things that make agency billing miserable.
Hourly rates.
You’d be paying for our learning curve. The estimate is our problem to get right, not yours to absorb.
Change orders you didn’t approve.
If scope shifts, we re-quote and you decide — before the work happens, never on the final bill.
Licence fees on your own product.
No rent, no lock-in, no ransom for the thing you paid us to build.
A retainer you didn’t ask for.
Ongoing support exists if you want it. It’s never a condition of getting the job finished.
07 — Questions, Answered
Pricing, plainly.
Why are there bands for sites but not for the rest?
Because site and platform work repeats enough that a range tells you something true, and the other disciplines don't. An automation brief and a game brief can each swing by an order of magnitude on details that only surface in conversation. Publishing a figure we'd immediately have to qualify would be a guess dressed up as a price — you'd plan around it, and one of us would end up disappointed.
What if the project turns out bigger than we thought?
If we got the estimate wrong, that's ours to absorb — the price is fixed. If you add to the scope, we quote the addition separately and you approve it before work starts. Either way, the original number doesn't quietly grow.
Can we start small and expand?
Usually the better plan. We'll scope a first phase that stands on its own and works in production, then quote the next one when you've seen it running. Nothing is architected to trap you into phase two.
We already have something. Do we pay for a review?
Usually $200–$500, depending on the size of the system and how long it takes to go through properly — a real review is real time. If it’s small and self-contained, we won’t charge you. Either way you get a straight answer: fix it, rebuild it, or leave it alone.
Something more specific? [email protected] answers within one business day.
