With hourly billing, you pay for time spent, while the value delivered is harder to measure. 

When you can’t easily measure value, you default to comparing what you can: hourly rates. A lower rate looks like a saving, but a cheaper hour doesn’t necessarily mean better work or faster delivery and the outcome you need gets less attention. Before long, reviews turn into debates about timesheets rather than progress.

If you sign off on digital spend, you can see the activity you pay for. What actually improves is much harder to see.

You pay a fixed price for each completed work item, regardless of how work is delivered. Greater efficiency means faster results for you, at no additional cost. Work items include features, enhancements, bug fixes, incidents, patches, design work, discovery tasks and reliability improvements. Keeping the platform stable counts as delivered work, just like building a new feature does.

• New builds and replatforming: A short discovery phase sets the scope and priorities. A fixed-price launch delivers the technical foundation, key integrations and core customer journeys first. After go-live, a roadmap guides improvements based on real usage and business priorities.

• Ongoing development teams: A stable core team works on an agreed number of fixed-price work items. You pay for completed work items, not for time spent. Monthly reporting shows what the team delivered and how delivery performance is changing.

One of Vaimo’s dedicated development teams used to work on an hourly retainer. Moving to fixed-price work items was the result of 18 months of work to modernise how Vaimo delivers software. By measuring delivery performance, defining clearer work items, improving team habits and using data to forecast outcomes, Vaimo built a model focused on delivering more value without compromising quality.

Here is what changed:

• More work delivered: The team increased throughput, completing 71 work items a month instead of 34.

• Quality improved: Incidents dropped by 30% over the same period.

• Better commercial value: The contract now delivers 25% more scope at 10% lower cost, giving the client more finished work for their investment.

• Part of a wider change: Across Vaimo, output has grown by more than 30% since the model was introduced in 2024, supported by 18 months of data and continuous improvements to delivery.