Why I don't bill by the hour.

When I started Sourav's iOS Studio, hourly billing was the obvious choice. It's what most developers do. It feels fair. It feels safe. I decided against it, and here's why.

Hourly billing rewards the wrong thing.

If I'm paid by the hour, the slower I work, the more I earn. Experience makes me faster, and faster makes me poorer. That's backwards. My clients don't want my hours. They want their app fixed, approved and in front of users.

Clients want a number, not a meter.

A team with a rejected build or a broken release is already stressed. "It depends how long it takes" adds a second worry: the bill. A fixed price removes it. They know what they'll pay before I start, and they can plan around it.

A fixed price forces a clear scope.

To price a project, I have to understand it. What's broken. What "done" looks like. What's out of scope. That conversation happens before any code is written, and it's often the most valuable part of the project. Vague work becomes a written plan.

For a one person business, hours are a ceiling.

I'm one person. There are only so many hours in my week. If my income is hours times rate, it has a hard limit, and the only way up is to work more. Pricing the outcome lets me get better without getting busier.

The trade-offs are real.

Fixed pricing isn't free. The risk moves to me:

• If I underestimate, I pay for it. So I scope carefully, and I start with a free call to understand the problem first.
• Scope creep is a threat. So every proposal says what's included and what isn't. New requests get their own price. No surprises in either direction.
• Some work is truly unknown. For that, I start with a small, fixed-price audit to find out what we're dealing with.

How it works in practice.

1. A free 20-minute call to understand the problem.
2. A written proposal: scope, timeline and price.
3. The work, with regular updates.
4. A clean handoff, with documentation.

That's it. No timesheets. No surprises.