Hourly billing sounds fair: you pay for exactly the time your project takes.
In practice, you're taking on all the risk. Estimates are soft, scope drifts, and every clarification email is billable. The agency's incentive isn't to finish — it's to keep the meter running politely.
Fixed-price packages flip the risk. If we scoped it badly, we absorb it. If a task takes longer than planned, that's our margin, not your invoice. The only way we stay profitable is by defining scope precisely and delivering efficiently — which happens to be exactly what you want from an agency.
The trade-off is honesty about boundaries. A fixed price needs a fixed scope: our packages list every inclusion, and extra work is a conversation before it happens, not a surprise line item after. Some projects genuinely can't be boxed — that's what our POA tiers are for, and we say so upfront.
If an agency can't tell you what something costs until they've "understood your unique needs" — for a ten-page website they've built two hundred times — the mystery isn't the scope. It's the margin.