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Metzger Creative
Pricing

What things cost.

Every band I work in is on this page, along with what it includes and what pushes it up or down. You should be able to tell whether this is affordable for you without booking anything.

Book 20 minutesSee the seven services

Monthly

Continuous work, on monthly terms.

An ongoing relationship, billed monthly, cancelable monthly. Best when the work is continuous, or when what you need is judgment more than a deliverable.

  • Fractional CTO$3.5K / $6.5K / $9K per month
  • Care plan$500 / $1.2K / $2.5K per month
Both monthly relationships on one scale, from zero. The small marks inside a band are its tiers.

Fractional CTO

Senior engineering leadership, at the number of days you actually need.

$3.5K / $6.5K / $9K per month

What it includes

  • Architecture and technical roadmap you can defend to a board
  • Hiring: scorecards, interviews and leveling for the engineers you bring on
  • Code review and standards for the team you already have
  • Vendor selection and build-versus-buy calls

What moves the number

  • Days per month, and how much of that is hands-on-keyboard rather than advisory
  • Whether you need me in front of your board or your customers
  • Hiring load: interviewing and leveling engineers takes real hours

Month to month, no minimum term. Stop it the month it stops being worth the money.

Care plan

Someone who already knows your system, on the hook when it breaks.

$500 / $1.2K / $2.5K per month

What it includes

  • Dependency and security patching
  • Uptime monitoring with a real escalation path
  • A block of development time each month
  • A named response time, written into the contract

What moves the number

  • Response time you need when something breaks
  • How much monthly development time is included
  • Whether uptime monitoring and on-call escalation are in scope

Projects

The number is fixed before the work is.

Fixed fee against a written scope. You know the number before anything starts, and it does not move unless you move the scope.

  • Technical audit$5K–$12K
  • Marketing site$6K–$15K
  • Web app MVP$25K–$75K
  • Mobile app$35K–$100K
  • AI integration sprint$6K
  • AI build$10K–$40K
Every project band on one scale, from zero, drawn from the same numbers the cards print. The red band is the audit, the place to start when you are not sure.

Technical audit

A senior read of what you already have, and a straight list of what to do about it.

$5K–$12K

What it includes

  • A written report you can hand to an investor, a board or a new hire
  • Architecture, data model and infrastructure review
  • Security and dependency risk, ranked by what would actually hurt you
  • A prioritized remediation plan with rough effort against each item

What moves the number

  • How many services and repositories are in scope
  • Whether infrastructure and CI are included or just application code
  • Whether you want a prioritized remediation plan or findings only

It stands on its own, and the fee comes off the first build engagement that follows.

Marketing site

A fast, accessible site you can edit yourself.

$6K–$15K

What it includes

  • Design and build, mobile first
  • A CMS your team can edit without breaking anything, or static content I maintain for you
  • Performance budgets enforced in CI, not measured once on launch day
  • Analytics, schema markup and the technical SEO baseline

What moves the number

  • Page count, and how many of those need their own design
  • Whether the content is yours to edit or mine to maintain
  • Custom motion and 3D work
  • Whether copy is written and photography exists

Web app MVP

The first version real users can pay for, built so the second version does not start over.

$25K–$75K

What it includes

  • Product and architecture decisions made with you, not presented to you
  • Auth, billing and the admin surfaces every app needs and nobody scopes
  • Automated tests on the paths that cost money when they break
  • Deploy pipeline, monitoring and a runbook you keep

What moves the number

  • How many user roles and distinct workflows ship in v1
  • Third-party integrations, especially payments and anything with a certification process
  • Whether you need multi-tenancy on day one
  • Compliance requirements: SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI

Mobile app

Native iOS and Android, built correctly for each platform and each store.

$35K–$100K

What it includes

  • Each platform gets its own native codebase: Swift on iOS, Kotlin on Android
  • React Native instead, when a shared codebase is the better trade for your roadmap
  • Store submission, review handling and release tooling
  • Offline and sync behavior designed up front rather than retrofitted
  • Crash reporting and staged rollout

What moves the number

  • One platform or both, and whether you want native per platform or a shared React Native codebase
  • Offline support and background sync
  • Hardware access: camera, Bluetooth, location, background processing
  • Whether an existing API is ready or the backend ships too

A shipped app needs a retainer. Store policy changes arrive on Apple and Google schedules rather than yours, and an unmaintained app eventually stops being installable.

AI integration sprint

Two weeks, one fixed fee, and an honest answer at the end.

$6K

What it includes

  • A working prototype against your real data, not a demo dataset
  • An evaluation set, so "is it good enough" has a number attached
  • A written recommendation, including "do not build this" when that is the answer
  • Everything built stays yours whichever way the decision goes

What moves the number

  • Nothing. The fee is fixed and the two weeks are the whole scope.

Sometimes the answer is that the full build is not worth doing. Finding that out here costs a fraction of finding it out at the end of a build.

AI build

The assistant or agent from the sprint, made production grade.

$10K–$40K

What it includes

  • Retrieval built and tuned against your actual corpus
  • Typed tools with validation, so the model cannot take an action you did not sign off on
  • Prompt-injection defense and a red-team pass before launch
  • Shipped behind your auth, inside your product, not in a separate widget

What moves the number

  • Retrieval quality work: how messy the source corpus is
  • How many tools the agent needs, and whether they write as well as read
  • Evaluation and red-teaming depth
  • Whether it ships behind your auth and into your existing UI

Hourly

For the work nobody can scope.

For work that genuinely cannot be scoped up front. Most work can be, so this comes up rarely.

Time and materials

For work that genuinely cannot be scoped in advance.

$150–$185 per hour

What it includes

  • Weekly invoices with the hours itemised
  • A written cap you set, which I do not cross without asking first
  • The same engineer every week, not a bench

What moves the number

  • Rush work and anything that displaces committed schedule sits at the top of the range
  • Long engagements with predictable scope sit at the bottom

Ask for a fixed fee first. Most work can be scoped, and this is what is left when it truly cannot.

How I price

The estimate is my risk, not yours.

Fixed fee, by default

A fixed fee moves the risk of a bad estimate from you to me. I made the estimate, so absorbing it is my problem.

The audit is the way in

If you are not ready to commit to a build, buy the smallest thing first. It stands on its own, and the fee comes off the first build engagement that follows.

No surprise invoices

Scope changes are written change orders you approve in advance. Hourly work runs against a cap you set. I would rather have an awkward conversation early than send an invoice you did not expect.

Questions people ask

Why publish prices at all?
Because you are trying to work out whether to spend an hour talking to me, and a discovery call that exists only to reveal a number wastes both of us. If the band is wrong for you, you have lost thirty seconds instead of a week.
Why are you cheaper than an agency?
There is no account manager, no project manager, no sales team, and no markup on subcontracted work. The rate reflects an absent overhead structure, not absent seniority.
What if the project turns out to be bigger than the band?
Then I say so on the call, not at proposal stage. The "what moves the number" list on each band is there so you can see it coming. If scope grows mid-engagement, that is a written change order you approve, never a surprise on an invoice.
What happens if you get hit by a bus?
Every statement of work includes a written continuity plan, and the architecture is documented as it is built rather than reconstructed afterward. I also work with a bench of senior engineers I know, the same bench I scale with when a project needs more hands. Continuity here means somebody who has already read the code, not a stranger opening it cold.

Still not sure which of these you need?

That is a normal place to be. Twenty minutes on a call will usually settle it, and I will tell you if the answer is that you do not need me yet.

Book 20 minutesSee the services