02How we work
There is no rate card. Here's what replaces it.
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
A rate card prices the wrong thing.
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.
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.
How a scope is built
Five steps, in this order, every time.
- 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
The scoping conversation, as a form.
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
Before you reach out.
- 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, and advisory retainer), and which fits which kind of decision.
- 03What you receiveThe concrete deliverable shapes behind the word 'strategy': what lands in your hands, and in what form.
- 04The first callWhat actually gets asked and decided in a scoping conversation, before any quote is written.
Bring us the decision. We'll build the scope with you.
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