Why the Diagnostic Costs Money
Free consultations produce sales calls. Paid diagnostics produce build plans. Here's the reasoning behind charging for the first step, and why it's credited toward the build.
Every service line at Revuity starts the same way: a paid diagnostic. For Function by Revuity, it's $8,500 over one to two weeks, credited in full toward the build. People ask why we charge for something most firms give away. It's a fair question, and the answer explains most of how we operate.
## Free consultations are sales calls
When a consultation is free, it has to be paid for somewhere. The somewhere is the engagement that follows. That means the person running your "free assessment" is incentivized to find problems that match what their firm sells, size them generously, and keep the findings vague enough that you need them to interpret the roadmap.
You've probably sat through one. Forty-five minutes of discovery questions, a deck two weeks later, and a proposal where the real information — what exactly gets built, what it costs, what happens if it doesn't work — is deferred to a phase you haven't bought yet.
A free consultation is not a diagnostic. It's the top of a funnel.
## What paying for it changes
When the diagnostic is a paid engagement with a fixed price and named deliverables, the incentives flip.
We're no longer selling the next phase during the diagnostic. We're delivering this one. The deliverable is a real build plan: the workflows mapped, the system shape defined, the scope and price of the build stated before any code. You leave with a roadmap you can execute — with us, with your own team, or with someone else entirely.
That last part matters. Because you paid for the plan, you own the plan. There is no hostage dynamic where the findings only make sense if you continue. Some clients take the diagnostic and build in-house. That's a fine outcome. The plan was the product.
## Why it's credited toward the build
Crediting the diagnostic against the build keeps it from being a toll. If the diagnostic surfaces a system worth building and you continue, you haven't paid for two things — the diagnostic becomes the first two weeks of the engagement. If you stop after the diagnostic, you paid for exactly what you received: a quantified plan.
We priced it deliberately. $8,500 is enough that both sides take the two weeks seriously, and small enough that it doesn't require a procurement cycle to say yes. Compare it to the alternatives: strategy consultants charge $50K to $200K to produce a plan and leave. We charge $8,500 to produce a plan, and then we're accountable to it — because the build price we quoted in the diagnostic is the price.
## The filter works in both directions
Charging for the first step also filters us. A team that won't spend $8,500 to find out what should be built is not going to fund a six-week production build, and it's kinder to both sides to learn that in week zero rather than after three unpaid scoping calls.
And it filters the work we take. The diagnostic forces us to look closely before we commit. If the problem doesn't have a system shape we're confident shipping, we say so in the diagnostic and don't propose a build. A fixed-scope model only survives if you're honest at the scoping stage.
## What this looks like in practice
Book a call. The call is free — it's thirty minutes to find out whether there's a fit and which service line applies. If there is, the diagnostic is the first real step: one to two weeks, a fixed price you know in advance, and a build plan you own at the end.
No decks. No discovery theater. A plan, a price, and a decision you can make with real information.