How an engagement is shaped, and what moves the cost
Make It Happen is a studio that shapes work four ways: a paid diagnosis, a closed project with defined scope, one service à la carte, or a retainer. Each mode says what is inside it and what is deliberately outside, and a fixed quote follows within three business days.
This page is not a price list and there will not be one. It is the shape of the work: what happens in each mode, what is inside it and what is deliberately outside. The number comes out of your scope, and scope comes out of a conversation.
A fixed quote within three business days
Tell us the objective, and three business days after that first conversation you have a fixed quote: the scope in writing, the phases named, the duration in weeks, options staged by depth. The contract is ready when the proposal is — drafted alongside it, not after you say yes — because the gap between yes and started is where momentum dies, and a project that waits three weeks for paperwork restarts from cold.
Four ways to buy. One way to work.
The modes compose, and most work walks the same path: diagnosis, then closed project, then retainer. The diagnosis names the work, the project builds the asset, the retainer keeps it alive. Pick the one that matches how much you already know, not how much you intend to spend later.
A paid diagnosis on its own. We map how the business actually runs, challenge the brief you arrived with, and write down what should be built, in what order — including the part that should not be built at all.
You know something is wrong and cannot name it. The lowest-friction way in, and the last point at which a project can still be stopped before it exists.
- Interviews with the people who do the work, not only the person who signs.
- A written diagnosis, findings prioritized, with the impossible part on page one and the reason next to it.
- Scope and roadmap, with a brief per deliverable and explicit acceptance criteria.
- A staged proposal if you want one, with the contract drafted in parallel.
- No build. Nothing is written in code during a diagnosis, and continuing is a separate decision you make after you read it.
- No obligation to continue with us. The document is written to be legible to any competent engineer, not only to the people who wrote it.
One proposal, a defined scope, phases with acceptance criteria, and options staged by depth so you choose how far it goes. This is the dominant shape of the work here.
You know what you want built and you need it to land on a date, with one party accountable for the system and the demand instead of two blaming each other.
- Exactly one foundation before anything is built: a design system, or an architecture and permission model, or an account and measurement setup.
- Working deliverables every week, running in your own accounts rather than in a demo environment of ours.
- Your dashboard live during delivery, not handed over at the end of it.
- Handover with the documentation to operate the thing without us.
- A closing report with the real numbers, including the ones that did not move.
- No open-ended scope. Work that falls outside what was agreed gets quoted before it is built, instead of absorbed quietly and argued about at the end.
- No staffing by the hour. We do not place people inside your team and invoice their time.
- No ongoing operation after handover. Keeping the system evolving is a retainer, and it is a separate decision you make once you already have the thing.
One discrete service on its own, scoped and delivered as a unit, with no requirement to buy the thing standing next to it in the catalog.
You have an internal team and one specific hole: a design system nobody owns, a measurement setup nobody trusts, documents still assembled by hand every month.
- A brief with acceptance criteria your own team signs off before work starts.
- The deliverable, running in your accounts, with the documentation to operate it.
- A working session with whoever on your side inherits it.
- Your dashboard for the duration, so progress is something you check rather than something you ask for.
- No diagnosis. This mode assumes the problem is already named correctly; if it is not, a diagnosis is the smaller mistake to make first.
- No adjacent work pulled in quietly. If the service depends on something you do not have, we say so before starting instead of widening scope mid-flight.
- Not every service is sold this way. Some do not hold up without a foundation underneath them, and we will tell you which before you buy.
A continuous engagement: demand managed month to month, content produced on a cadence, agents tuned against real transcripts, the product kept evolving, advisory when a decision needs it.
The work is ongoing by nature — a channel that has to be fed every week, or a system that has to keep up with the business it runs.
- A scope agreed in advance each month, with what moves to the next month written down rather than assumed.
- A service level agreement in the contract, not a response time promised in a meeting.
- Working deliverables every week, the same cadence as a project.
- Your dashboard, permanently, showing the numbers you are measuring us against.
- A quarterly review at which either side can end it with notice.
- No unbounded scope. A retainer has a named scope per month, and work outside it is quoted before it is built.
- No hours banked, and no balance rolled forward to the next month.
- No transfer of the reusable foundation underneath. What the agreement transfers, and what it does not, is named in writing before work starts.
What we do not sell, and why we say so out loud
- 01
How much of the real process is already written down. If it lives in three people's heads and a spreadsheet, the opening weeks go into recovering it before anything can be built against it.
- 02
How many roles need their own view. Every role that sees a different screen is its own set of permissions, its own dashboard, and its own list of things it must not be able to do.
- 03
How much history has to move. Pulling five years of records out of a tool that was never built to let them go is a project inside the project, and it is usually the part nobody planned.
- 04
Whether the demand side runs at the same time. Building the asset and feeding it in parallel is faster overall and heavier in the same weeks, and that is a choice you make at proposal stage.
A cheap brochure site. Five pages and a contact form is a legitimate product and it is not ours — everything we build assumes something behind it that has to keep working on a Monday morning.
Design without the build behind it. We do not hand over a picture of an interface for somebody else to interpret. The design and the working thing are one deliverable, or neither.
People by the hour. You cannot buy two of us for a month. What is for sale is a scope with a result attached, which is also why nobody here is rewarded for taking longer.
Media buying with no strategy under it. We will not run campaigns against an offer nobody has tested, a page that does not convert, or a lead that lands in somebody's inbox and dies there.
A price before a scoping conversation. Any number stated before we know how many roles, how much history and how much of the process is documented is a guess, and a guess gets corrected the week the work exposes what it missed.
Questions buyers actually ask
What does a project like this cost?
Four things drive what a production platform costs: how much of your process is documented, how many roles need their own view, how much history has to move, and whether demand runs in parallel. No number appears here: any number written before those are known is a guess. We commit instead to a fixed quote within three business days.
What happens in the first conversation?
You tell us the objective and what is in the way. We ask about the process, the roles and the history, and we say out loud which part we think is impossible — there is always one. You leave knowing whether you are in the right shop. Three business days later, a fixed quote.
How long before I see something working?
A diagnosis ends in a document in one to two weeks. À la carte runs two to six weeks end to end. A closed project puts one foundation down first, then ships working deliverables every week, so something is visible long before the final week.
Can I start small and expand later?
That is the usual path. A diagnosis becomes a closed project becomes a retainer, and each step is its own decision with its own scope and its own signature. Nothing obliges the next one. The modes compose because they were designed to: name the work, build the asset, keep it alive.
What happens if we need something that was not in the scope?
It gets quoted before it is built, not absorbed quietly and argued about at the end. Scope is agreed in writing before anyone starts, and work outside it is a decision of its own — you see what it adds in weeks, and you say yes or no. A retainer works the same way, month by month.
The possible part of the impossible.
If you have an idea that shouldn't work, bring it. We will tell you which part is genuinely impossible and which part is only hard. Most of it is the second one.