NoFixed is a grassroots movement to raise the value of web development and marketing while improving the quality of life for web practitioners by ending fixed bid contracts. Fixed bid contracts establish the scope, price, and timeline of a project before it starts. These types of engagements are a bad idea for several reasons.

It happens every day, potential clients call in requesting a “quick quote” for a website. They give us a few details on the project and then poof, we are expected to predict an accurate number. In web development, this is just not possible. Every project is different. Fixed bids create adversarial relationships between web vendors and clients perpetuating a vicious cycle of misaligned expectations and suboptimal or failed projects. Fixed bidding has generated a tremendous amount of waste, lowering real and perceived client value while forcing talent to work long hours for less money. Take a look at this example as Andy Brandt from Code Sprinters gives us a realistic impression of what typically happens in a fixed bid project.

"Every software developer knows they can't accurately predict how long a particular feature will take, so they guess. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem starts when this guess is presented as solid reality, which is exactly what happens in a typical bidding process. Since each company knows there is a risk in their estimates, they compensate for it by overestimating. Industry standard for security margin on estimates is somewhere around 25 percent, which shows how inaccurate they typically are. In any case, what you get as a bid is in actuality a guess, bloated by some margin so that the developer feels safe they won't lose money if things go wrong.

Let's say someone tells you a project will cost $25,000. We all know that in the end it might cost $24,998 or $25,231 but it won't cost exactly $25,000. In fact it's more likely that it will cost either $20,000 or $30,000. In the first case, you lose $5,000 in money or features that might have been developed. In the second case, you’ll receive an inferior project. Why? Because if the project is over budget but a contract is on a fixed price, every sane company will do all they can to limit their losses. In other words, they’ll finish the product as quickly as possible—just kick it out the door, the sooner the better. In software, kicking it out the door usually involves developing poor, undocumented code, solving problems via quick hacks rather than elegant solutions, and reducing testing to the absolute minimum. To further reduce costs, the company may replace senior developers with interns, working overtime. If, heaven forbid, not only the price but also the deadline was fixed and penalties apply, the software company has an even bigger incentive to lower the quality to limit losses. That’s one reason so many IT projects (be it software development or deployment) end up disappointing clients or failing altogether."

We don’t work like that. At LevelTen, we have moved away from using fixed bids to using more of an agile approach. Typically we work in two week iterations, allowing us to commit and deliver client requests at the end of each iteration. In turn, the client is happy because at the end of each iteration they are able to see exactly what is being delivered and are able to make any changes/additions before heading into the next phase.

Sign the NoFixed Manifest here