Fixed price project outsourcing, built to hold.

No, not if you already have a detailed scope. If you arrive with a complete SOW, RFP, or requirements document, send it to us, and we return a fixed-price proposal in 5 business days. We'll review it for gaps and flag anything missing, but if the document is buildable as-is, you skip the workshop entirely. The workshop exists for the other case: prospects who have a vision, a deck, a Notion doc, or an investor narrative, but not yet a buildable artifact. In that case, the workshop is how Unified turns rough scope into a SOW with nothing left to assumption, every risk identified and owned, and an estimate accurate enough to underwrite a fixed price.

Workshop fees are sized to your project's domain, integration topology, and team availability. Senior squad of BA, Solution Architect, and Tech Lead for 10 working days. Paid upfront. 100% credited against the fixed-price project if it proceeds. Yours to keep if it does not: the SOW, the architecture diagram, the risk register, the milestone plan, the proposal. Request a workshop quote on the contact form below, and the Engagement Director returns an exact number within 48 hours of the fit call.

Then we say so in writing at the end of the workshop. The SOW is still yours. We will recommend a Dedicated Pod or Staff Augmentation model based on what we found. No build dollars were spent. We turn down roughly 1 in 4 fixed-price inquiries at the end of the workshop, usually because discovery, R&D, or pivots are part of the journey. Saying no is a feature of this model.

The industry standard is a 20-30% buffer baked invisibly into the rate. Profit to the vendor if the project goes smoothly. Unified shows the buffer as a separate 15% line item on the proposal and the invoice. If we do not consume it, we credit 50% back at close. If we consume past it, we eat the variance. The buffer is auditable. Your CFO can run a line item against it in any monthly review.

12-36 weeks end-to-end is the sweet spot. Below 12 weeks, the workshop overhead is a higher proportion of the project (we will sometimes pre-discount the workshop in that case). Above 36 weeks, the world moves underneath you. We will usually recommend either splitting into two SOWs back-to-back or moving to a Dedicated Pod model. The longest fixed price project we have shipped was 11 months. The shortest was 6 weeks.

The Change Control Charter handles it. Four tiers: clarifications are free, flex pool covers small additions, scope additions get a transparent quote, pivots trigger a re-scope. Most projects see 2-6% change orders against the original SOW, well below the industry's 60-80%. The Charter lives in the SOW, not the email thread. Change is welcomed, not weaponized.

A named pod sized to the SOW. Typically 4-10 people: a senior architect carried over from the workshop, senior engineers (FE / BE / AI), a QA engineer, a DevOps engineer, an Engineering Manager, and a Product Engineer. Resumes shared at SOW lock. Same anti-rotation clause as the Dedicated Pod page. Substitutions need your written approval with a 60-day overlap.

Payments are milestone-paced and Acceptance-Gate-triggered. Typical schedule: workshop fee upfront (credited), 25-30% at SOW lock + Foundation, 40-50% across the build milestones (paid per Acceptance Gate), 15-20% at UAT sign-off + Transition. No calendar-based billing. The milestones move payment, not the calendar. Invoices reconcile against the open-book buffer at close.

Yes. 30-day warranty period of post-launch support on any defect that violates a documented acceptance criterion. Fixes are unbilled within that window. Beyond 30 days, the natural next step is usually a small Dedicated Pod or a maintenance retainer, with no obligation. The 30-day warranty is in the SOW, not contingent on a follow-on engagement.

Encouraged. The workshop SOW is yours; if you choose to shop it, send it to other vendors and ask them to quote against the same scope. Most vendors will not produce a SOW at this level of clarity even after they win the business, which is exactly why we lead with it. If a cheaper vendor wins on price, we ask one favor: come back after the project and tell us how the buffer-pad turned out. We learn something either way.