Work Plan - Estimate

Why is WPE not just an estimate?

We do not provide WPE without complete detailed PRD (including full technical documentation and High-Fidelity Wireframes or Mockups). If you do not have a PRD yet we recommend the Discovery Phase as the best way to start the project.

In case you already have a completed PRD then let’s dive deeper and bring up an analogy. When you set out to build a house any property development company will only provide an estimate based on a general plan with a list of all construction activities, man hours, transportation costs, fuel costs and of course material costs. Any experienced foreman who worked at least 5-7 years will not calculate required materials without a design project for the room and general plan. And when you have a detailed room design modern software such as Sketchup will estimate the material costs automatically, so in this case you can and should expect a detailed estimate from your foreman. We drew this analogy to compare a more abstract field of web development to something more grounded such as property development.

So why when it comes to contacting a web development agency or freelancer you commonly receive some weird aggregate numbers without any justification and no breakdown? Why do estimates received from different sources have such a huge variance? And why does no one give a solid deadline and even then the promises are not kept?

The answer to all these questions is that the contractors do not study your project thoroughly. They don't know the project better than you, so they make a “shot in the dark” assessment without any guarantees, although they often require an advance payment (up to 50% in advance). Which is why they cannot provide you with a detailed work plan and a detailed estimate for each feature on each page up to every button, broken down by type of work (designer, frontend and backend developer, QA specialist, project manager). This short sighted approach is born out of a lack of consideration of what will happen to your project after development and how to implement it. Usually additional costs such as configuring a prod server and other costs down the line are not taken into consideration. As a result, instead of WPE, you just get very rough numbers based on wrong assumptions and a promise of a deadline, so you have to believe in Santa Claus or magic so you can cross your fingers and wait that everything that was promised will come true, but usually it is the opposite. Clients often come to us with a half-baked project, which is often very hard to salvage, so the best approach is to unfortunately throw it into the trash along with your money and time and start it all over again.