Fixed price is not the same as cheap
Why regulated buyers should distrust cheap — and distrust day rates almost as much.
In regulated financial services, cheap reads as risky, and buyers are right to read it that way. Corners cut in a marketing website are embarrassing; corners cut in a client-money migration are a section 166 review. We never sell on cheap.
But day rates have their own pathology. A day-rate migration transfers all schedule risk to the buyer: every discovered complication, every slipped dependency, every meeting that should have been an email — the meter runs on you. The incentives are simply wrong. The supplier profits from the project getting longer, and migration projects are extremely good at getting longer.
What fixed price actually commits us to
A fixed price per source system, banded by record volume and complexity, agreed before we start and held. It commits us to scope discipline (which is why we insist on a readiness assessment first), and it puts the productivity risk on us, where it belongs. If the work takes longer than we modelled, that's our margin, not your budget.
The honest caveats
Fixed price requires honesty on both sides of the contract. Client responsibilities — source access, SME availability, sign-off turnaround — are named in the statement of work, because a fixed price against an unavailable subject-matter expert is fiction. Data quality remediation is scoped from assessment findings and priced separately, because remediating unknown data sight-unseen is how fixed-price firms go out of business — or worse, cut corners silently.
The quote is the price. That sentence does more for a change programme's sleep quality than any discount ever has.
Got a cutover date? Tell us the source system, the target, and the deadline — we'll tell you within 48 hours whether we can hit it and what the Assessment will cost.
freddie@godwit.uk