02How we work
Pricing and scoping
Prices aren't published anywhere on this site, on purpose. This is the honest substitute: exactly how a scope gets built, and exactly how that scope turns into a number.
Why “it depends” is the honest answer
Why we scope each engagement instead of quoting rates
A published rate card prices seniority or hours. What actually determines the cost of a good engagement is the decision behind it: how much evidence it takes to answer well, how much of your organization needs to be involved, and how much is genuinely at stake if the answer is wrong. Two companies of identical size can face wildly different scopes depending on which of those three is large. The guide to what drives the cost of a consulting engagement walks through those variables as they play out across the market, not just here. The vocabulary of day rates, fixed fees and change orders is defined, with opinions attached, in a glossary of consulting terms.
That’s why every engagement starts with a scope, not a price. The five-step process below is exactly how that scope is built, and every number that ever reaches you traces back to one of these five steps, not to a bracket you were sorted into. It is the same evidence-first habit behind a case built on 65+ competitor evaluations and 55+ market reports before a single recommendation was written down. The one engagement priced differently is AI Implementation, and how the profit-share model is priced is written out just as plainly.
In one line
The quote is built from the scope, not from a rate card or a company-size bracket.
How a scope is built
How scoping works
- 01
State the decision, not the department
"We need help with marketing" isn't a scopeable question. "Should we enter this second market before or after this product launches" is. The first pass of scoping is turning a general area of concern into a specific, answerable question.
- 02
Size the evidence the answer actually needs
A market-entry call needs competitive and market analysis; an operating-process problem needs time-and-motion data from inside the business. The evidence required (not the seniority of who's asking) is what drives how much work a scope contains.
- 03
Name what has to come from your side
Access to data, time from specific people, and decision-making authority to act on the answer. A scope that doesn't name these upfront is the single most common reason engagements slip: not analysis taking longer than planned.
- 04
Set the timeline the question can actually bear
Some decisions are urgent and narrow; others are high-stakes enough to warrant more time even under pressure to move fast. The scope states which, and the timeline follows the decision's real cost of being wrong: not a generic project-length default.
- 05
Price follows the scope, once, in writing
The quote is built from the four steps above, not from a rate card or a company-size bracket. It arrives after the scoping conversation, in writing, and it doesn't change mid-engagement unless the scope itself changes, and if it does, that's a conversation, not an invoice surprise.
Try it yourself
Start a scoping conversation
The request-a-quote page runs the same five steps as a structured tool: practice area, the actual objective, timeline, and organization size: building a written brief instead of asking you to guess a budget number upfront. It composes the brief for you; it never quotes a price on the page, because nothing here does.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
- Why doesn't Praxis publish prices?
- Because the honest answer to "what does this cost" is "it depends on the scope," and a published number invites the wrong comparison: shopping on price for a service where the real variable is what decision you're actually trying to make. See /how-we-work/what-you-receive for what a scope's price actually buys.
- Is the first conversation itself free?
- Yes. A scoping conversation is exactly that (scoping) with no obligation and no cost. You get a written quote afterward only if the engagement makes sense for both sides.
- What if the scope turns out to be wrong once the work starts?
- It's flagged the moment it's found, with the change and its cost stated plainly before any additional work begins: never absorbed silently into the timeline, and never invoiced without agreement first.
More on how we work
The rest of the methodology.
- 01Engagement modelsThe three shapes an engagement takes: defined-scope, phased, or an advisory retainer, and which one fits which kind of decision in front of you.
- 03What you receiveThe concrete deliverables behind the word 'strategy': what you receive, in what order, and in what form.
- 04The first callWhat gets asked and decided on the first call: a scoping conversation covering the decision, the evidence, and the fit, before any quote is written.
Start with a scoping call
A scoping conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You'll leave it with a clear sense of what the work would actually involve.
No obligation · a scoping conversation first