Everything that happens between the brief and the invoice.
A brief, a call, a scope you sign, interviews, one drafted version, two named revision rounds, delivery.
The detail below is the part that usually sits in a contract nobody reads until something has already gone wrong: who is in the room, what we need from you and when, what actually lands in your inbox, and what it costs if the job changes after we have agreed what the job is.
From your first email to the final file
Brief
You send what you have. A paragraph is enough to start; your current site, a competitor list and whatever positioning document exists are better. We read it and reply within two business days with questions, and with a plain statement of what we think the real problem is. No charge for that, and no obligation in either direction.
Intro call
Twenty minutes. The person who will write the copy is on the call, because there is nobody here to hand you to. We come with a view rather than a questionnaire, and if we think you need the Positioning Diagnostic instead of the thing you asked for, you hear it on that call.
Scope, written and signed
We write the brief back to you: audience, goal, deliverables, page counts, dates, price. You argue with it until it is right, then you sign it off. That document is what the revision rounds are measured against, so it earns an hour of your attention rather than a skim. Payment is 50% to start, 50% on delivery; the first half is due here, and the turnaround clock starts here.
Research
Interviews with the people who sell the thing and, where you can arrange it, two or three people who bought it. Support tickets. Churn reasons. Sales-call notes, and the objection your team is tired of hearing. Your competitors read properly, which mostly means reading them out loud and writing down what each one is actually claiming. What we need from you at this stage is access and quick answers, not availability for workshops.
One drafted version
The draft arrives with the argument for it written underneath: why this order, which claim is carrying the page, what came out. Where a sentence was a close call, the version that lost sits in the margin with the reason it lost. You are reading a position, not picking from a menu.
Round one, then round two
Structural first, then line by line, in that order. Re-polishing a paragraph you are about to delete wastes your afternoon and ours. The policy sits further down this page, including what pushes a change outside the included rounds.
Handover
Final copy in whatever your build actually consumes: a document, a sheet keyed to page and module, or rows your developer can paste without retyping anything. The balance is invoiced with it. On payment, the words are yours.
What we need from you, and when
None of this is a surprise if you read it now. All of it is a surprise in week three.
- Before the call
- Your current site, whatever positioning document exists even if nobody in the building believes it any more, and the name of the competitor that worries you.
- At sign-off
- One person with the authority to approve copy. Not a committee, and not a committee with one person carrying messages back to it.
- During research
- Introductions to two or three customers, and permission to talk to whoever answers the support inbox. The second one is usually more useful than the first.
- At each revision round
- Consolidated feedback, in one document, from everyone who gets a say. Eleven separate emails over two weeks is how one round quietly becomes three.
- Before we write a headline
- Someone who can tell us what the CMS or the template will not allow. Character limits are cheaper to hear about early.
A revision round is not a chance to relitigate the brief. It is a chance to make the brief you signed land harder.
Round one, round two
Every figure on pricing includes 2 revision rounds per deliverable, measured against the brief as it was signed off at kickoff. They do the same job in the same order every time.
- Structural
- Order, emphasis, what to cut, what is missing, whether the argument holds up at all. Change your mind about the whole approach here and it costs nothing. This is the round people are tempted to skip, and skipping it is what makes the second one expensive.
- Line edit
- Wording, rhythm, headline alternatives, product and legal corrections, the sentence your finance director wants said differently. Structure is settled by this point. If it turns out it is not, we go back to round one and say so rather than polish something that is about to move.
What starts the hourly clock
Past round two, or when the audience, the goal or the scope changes after sign-off, work is billed at €85 an hour.
The rate matters less than the trigger, so here is the trigger in plain words. If the brief you signed is still the brief, it is included. If you have decided to sell to a different buyer, or added two pages, or moved the launch a month earlier, that is a different job and it gets priced as one.
Nothing is billed by surprise. Hourly work does not start until we have sent you an estimate and you have said yes to it in writing, which protects us as much as you: it is also how we avoid absorbing a fourth round nobody ever agreed to.
If you go quiet
It happens. A funding round, a reorg, a product decision that has to land before anyone is willing to approve a headline.
Tell us and we park it. Your deposit stays on the project, the delivery date moves by however long the gap ran plus the time it takes to get back into your product, and nobody charges anybody for the pause.
If we hear nothing for a month, we send one email asking whether to park it or close it. If that goes unanswered as well, we close the file, invoice the work completed against the deposit, and send you whatever exists in draft. Nothing is held hostage, and nothing accrues quietly in the background.
Confidentiality and who owns what
- The words
- Yours on final payment. Copyright, drafts, the research underneath them, all of it. No licence, no usage window, nothing that reverts to us. Terms that never say this outright are a description rather than terms.
- NDAs
- Available on request, and a reasonable one gets signed. Send it before the intro call if you would rather not describe an unreleased product to a stranger without one in place.
- Either way
- Your roadmap, your churn numbers and your internal disagreements stay in the studio. Interview notes are kept while the project runs and are not recycled into anyone else’s work.
- Publishing anything
- We ask first, and no is an answer. Nothing on this site is delivered client work, which is why every sample on work says so on its own face instead of relying on one disclaimer somewhere.
Two languages, written twice
English and Bulgarian are both written from the brief rather than translated from each other. That is the whole of it, and it costs more than it sounds like it should.
A translated headline keeps the grammar of the language it came from. Bulgarian glues its definite article to the end of the word, puts the stress somewhere else in the sentence, and has no comfortable equivalent for half the verb-noun constructions English marketing runs on. A line that lands in one language sags in the other, and the sag is obvious to anyone who actually sells in it.
How it runs in practice: strategy documents go out in English unless you ask otherwise, since that is usually the language your board reads. Customer-facing copy gets written in whichever languages you sell in. Asking for both adds to the turnaround, and we tell you how much at sign-off rather than after you have committed to a launch date.
Start with the brief, not the call
Write down what you are selling, who is not buying it, and what you have already tried. We read it and come back within two business days with questions, and with which stage we think you actually need.