Top 10 App Development Consulting Firms 2026:#1 Frenchy Digital

The most useful number I found while researching app consulting firms this morning was $6,000, and only one firm on my list printed anything like it.

That's what Headway, a product studio in Green Bay, Wisconsin, charges for a two-week assessment track, according to its own service page. You get a kickoff workshop, a scored review, a written report and a priority roadmap walked through live with your team. Three tracks, $6,000 each.

Why does that matter? Because the question founders ask me most often isn't "who is the best app consultant". It's "what do I pay just to find out what I should build?" Almost nobody answers it in public.

So here is my claim, with the date on it. On September 30, 2026 I scored ten app development consulting firms on six things a buyer can check from a public page in about fifteen minutes per firm. Headway came first with 11 of 12. The average was 7.6. Only three of the ten publish a price for their discovery work.

To be clear about the conflict up front: I run Frenchy Digital, which sells discovery and then builds apps. It isn't in the scored table. It gets a disclosed section near the end, where I score it on the same rubric, show every cell, report where it lands (tied with Headway on points, not ahead; I wrote the rubric, so discount accordingly) and say who should pick someone else.

If you're still deciding whether you need a consultant at all, rather than an agency or a freelancer, start with our guide to consultant vs agency vs freelancer. This article assumes you've decided you want someone to help you decide, and names who.

An app consulting engagement sells a decision, not software. The ranking should measure how clearly a firm packages that decision.

The wrong model goes like this: a consulting firm is an app agency with smarter slides, so pick the agency with the best portfolio and let it "do strategy" for the first few weeks.

The problem is incentives. If the strategy phase is free or blended into the build, its conclusion is almost always "build it, with us, at this size". That isn't dishonest. It's just what happens when the person advising you is paid by the answer.

The better model is that discovery is its own product. It has a scope, a price, a duration and deliverables you keep. You should be able to walk away from it with a plan another team could build from. If you can't, you bought a sales process.

Therefore the attributes worth scoring are the ones that tell you whether a firm treats discovery as a product: does it name the offer, list what you get, publish a price, show named engagements where the thinking is described, and say who owns the output?

Most rankings of consulting firms don't do this. They list the same large agencies as every app development ranking, then score them on counters: products launched, funds raised by clients, awards. I found several of those counters today, and none of them tells you what a discovery phase costs or what it hands you.

One more distinction before the list. A fractional CTO is not a discovery phase. A fractional CTO sits inside your company for months, makes architecture and hiring calls and manages vendors. A discovery phase is bounded and ends. thoughtbot lists fractional leadership among its services, and so do we, but most first-time buyers need the bounded thing first. This ranking scores the bounded thing.

Before scoring anyone, each candidate had to pass two tests: a strategy, discovery or assessment offer described on its own site with named work, and no acquisition, merger or shutdown from 2024 to 2026 that I could find.

I kept the scope to product studios that sell discovery ahead of app builds. That rules out the large IT consultancies, whose strategy arms sell to enterprise programs rather than to someone planning one app. It also rules out list authors who rank themselves inside their own tables.

I started with about fifteen names that recur on app consulting lists and cut. Here's who didn't make it.

• Big Nerd Ranch: A famous name in iOS training and consulting. Per Wikipedia's entry on its founder, it was sold to Amdocs in June 2020 and folded into the subsidiary Stellar Elements. It no longer operates as an independent studio. Out.
• Fueled: A well-known New York app studio that merged with 10up in 2023. I could not confirm its current ownership on a primary page on September 30, 2026, and one data aggregator summary described a 2026 transaction I could not verify anywhere else. Rather than guess, I left it out.
• Clearbridge Mobile: Appears on many older app consulting lists. Its site failed a secure connection on September 30, 2026, so I could check nothing on its own pages. Out until it loads.
• Large IT consultancies: Accenture-scale and Thoughtworks-scale firms sell strategy to enterprise programs. Out of scope for a buyer planning one app.

For the ten that remain, searches on each name plus "acquired" found no 2024 to 2026 deal. Absence from search results isn't proof. Ask anyone you shortlist who owns the company and whether that has changed recently, because ownership decides who staffs your project next year.

Two firms need a status note. thoughtbot's old "discovery sprint" address now redirects to a service it calls a Shaping Sprint. And Atomic Object announced a new managing partner in Grand Rapids on March 16, 2026. Neither is a red flag. Both are reminders that service pages move under you.

Six attributes, 0 to 2 points each, twelve maximum, all checked on September 30, 2026 from pages anyone can open.

• Discovery offer: 2 for a named discovery, strategy or assessment offer on the firm's own site with its deliverables listed; 1 for a named offer whose deliverables are vague; 0 for none.
• Discovery price: 2 for a price for that offer on the firm's own site (a stated free call counts); 1 for project budget ranges only; 0 for neither.
• Named strategy work: 2 for at least one named engagement on the firm's own site where the strategy or discovery work itself is described; 1 for named work where the strategy role isn't described; 0 for none.
• Named leaders: 2 for leaders named with titles on the firm's own site; 1 for leaders named only in an old blog post or by third parties; 0 for none found.
• IP terms: 2 for an explicit statement that the client owns code and IP; 1 for language such as 'yours to keep' short of that; 0 for nothing on the pages checked.
• Years operating: 2 for a founding year or equivalent on the firm's own site; 1 for a founding year from third parties only; 0 for none.

Ties break on named strategy work, then years operating, then alphabetically.

Named leaders is the attribute that's different from our app and web rankings, and it's there for a consulting-specific reason. In a build, you care about the team. In a consulting engagement, you're paying for judgment, and judgment belongs to people. A firm that won't tell you who runs it is asking you to buy advice from nobody in particular.

What I excluded, and why.Products launched, funds raised by clients, exits and retention rates, because each is the firm's own count about its own clients. Team size, because it says nothing about who runs your discovery. Awards, because most are paid or self-nominated. Clutch ratings, hourly rates and minimum project sizes, because Clutch blocks automated reading and the figures that reach me through snippets can't be confirmed.

How to re-check it.Open each firm's services, pricing, about and case study pages. Search the site for "discovery", "assessment", "sprint", "$", "own" and "intellectual property". Read the about page for names and a founding year. It takes about fifteen minutes per firm. If something changes after September 30, the score should change too.

Headway leads with 11 of 12. The top three are the only firms that publish a discovery price, and that single column explains most of the gap to the rest.

Do the arithmetic. The ten totals add to 76, so the average is 7.6 of 12, about 63%. The leader discloses about 1.45x what the average firm does, and 2.75x what the firm at the bottom does.

Now read the columns instead of the rows. Discovery price: seven of ten score zero. IP terms: seven of ten score zero. Years operating: nine of ten score the full 2. Named leaders: eight of ten score at least 1.

So the consulting market is open about who it is and how long it has been around. It is quiet about what discovery costs and who owns what discovery produces. For a product whose entire output is a document and a prototype, the ownership silence is the stranger of the two.

Here's the part that surprised me. The three firms at the top aren't the famous ones. thoughtbot, which has written about product process in public for roughly two decades, sits sixth. That's not a verdict on thoughtbot's advice. It's a measure of what thoughtbot chooses to publish about the commercial side of it.

Every score above traces to a cell below. Where a cell quotes a figure, it's the firm's own statement.

Three cells deserve a note. Chop Dawg's discovery offer is a free 45-minute strategy call plus a custom project plan. That's a published price (free), so it scores 2 on price, but it's part of the sales process rather than a separate paid phase, so the offer itself scores 1.

Atomic Object doesn't price its research, design and planning phase. Its homepage does say projects usually run 3 to 18 months or more with a budget of $50k to over $1 million. That's a project budget, not a discovery price, so it scores 1.

And thoughtbot's founding year comes from its own 2018 blog post, which says it started fifteen years earlier. That's own-site evidence, so it scores 2. Its leadership, though, appears only in a February 2021 post announcing that Diana Bald had become CEO and Chad Pytel COO. I found no current leadership page, so that column scores 1.

Each profile says who the firm suits, what I could verify and what I couldn't.None of this judges the quality of anyone's advice. I haven't hired any of them.

Top ranked

1

Headway

a priced assessment with a refund clause

Score: 11 of 12. Suits: startups and product teams that want an outside diagnosis of an existing product, or a structured start on a new one, at a known price.

Verifiable: its Product and Team Health Assessment runs three two-week tracks (decisions, design, and development per platform) at $6,000 each, ending in a written report, recommendations and a priority roadmap. Its working with Headway page lists a startup health assessment, competitive analysis and user research, quotes a named launch lead at One Drop, and offers a guarantee: if you decide within 45 days it isn't the right partner, you get 50% of your spend to date back and keep everything created so far. Its about page says it was founded in 2015 and names its CEO, COO and CTO.

Not verifiable:the "keep everything" line sits inside the guarantee rather than in a general IP statement, so IP scores 1. Its homepage counters about client fundraising and survival are its own, and I don't repeat them.

Visit Headway

2

Designli

a one-week audit at a printed price

Score: 10 of 12. Suits: non-technical founders with a live product that has stalled and who want a cheap, fast second opinion before spending more.

Verifiable: its FAQ prices Impact Week at $1,700 for a one-week senior audit with a findings report and a 90-day plan. The Impact Week page describes discovery workshops, a code assessment and a design audit, and says the scored audit and 90-day plan are yours to keep. Its story page names co-founders Keith Shields and Josh Tucker and traces the company to a predecessor, Applits, from 2012.

Not verifiable:named clients (Grappos, National Trench Safety) appear without a description of strategy work, so that column scores 1. "Yours to keep" covers the audit, not code in general, so IP scores 1.

Visit Designli

3

Chop Dawg

free first step and an explicit ownership stance

Score: 9 of 12. Suits: early founders who want a build partner with monthly pricing and a clear promise on code ownership.

Verifiable: its pricing page lists a free strategy call and action plan, product design from $5K a month, MVPs and native apps from $7.5K a month and AI features from $10K a month, and says it has worked with clients since 2009. Its article on code ownership says partners see and own everything, code and intellectual property, and that the code lives in the client's own GitHub repository. That's the only explicit ownership statement on this list.

Not verifiable:its founder is named by third-party profiles, not on the pages I checked, so leaders scores 1. Its success stories (LA Gear, Mister Softee, City of Peachtree Corners) are builds, and the strategy role isn't described. The free call is a sales step, so the offer scores 1.

Visit Chop Dawg

4

Netguru

the most complete published discovery scope

Score: 8 of 12. Suits: funded companies in Europe or serving several markets that want a thorough discovery before a larger build.

Verifiable: its product discovery page says engagements run two to six weeks and deliver a validated problem statement, research findings, a prioritized feature list, a feasibility report, wireframes or a prototype and a phased plan with estimates. It names discovery work for Fundid, Breadfast, Careem and Keller Williams. Its about page gives 2008 as its founding year and names co-founder and CEO Kuba Filipowski.

Not verifiable: no price (the page says you get a proposal rather than a range) and no IP terms.

Visit Netguru

5

Atomic Object

a long planning phase with published budgets

Score: 8 of 12. Suits: established companies with a complex product and the budget for a careful research phase.

Verifiable: its homepage gives 2001 as its founding year, lists offices in Ann Arbor, Chicago, Grand Rapids and Raleigh, and says projects usually run 3 to 18 months or more with budgets from $50k to over $1 million. A post on its own blog describes the research, design and planning phase as lasting a couple of weeks to a few months, with alignment, product validation, technical validation and a phased plan as its outputs. A March 2026 release names its co-CEO and a new managing partner.

Not verifiable: no discovery price, no IP terms, and its named clients (Cleveland Clinic, Quell, Pixelberry) are presented as builds.

Visit Atomic Object

The bottom half isn't worse at advising. It publishes less about the commercial side of advice.

6

thoughtbot

shaping sprints and two decades of public process

Score: 7 of 12. Suits: teams that want a short, experiment-driven sprint to test an idea before committing a roadmap.

Verifiable: its Shaping Sprint page promises a testable artifact (a clickable prototype, a proof of concept, a roadmap document or an ad experiment) and names case studies for Harvard Business Review and CloseKnit Health. A 2018 post says the company started fifteen years earlier.

Not verifiable: no price and no IP terms on the pages checked. Leadership appears in a February 2021 post about a CEO change, which may not be current.

Visit thoughtbot

7

Sidebench

healthcare strategy with named leaders

Score: 7 of 12. Suits: digital health companies and health systems that need strategy and compliance awareness from the first workshop.

Verifiable: its services page describes strategy and discovery workshops leading to tailored business strategy and actionable roadmaps. Its case studies include nOCD, Children's Hospital Los Angeles and Cortica, many listing strategy as a service. Its about page names Partner and CEO Kevin Yamazaki and a head of strategy.

Not verifiable: no founding year on its own pages (2012 comes from third parties), no price and no IP terms.

Visit Sidebench

8

Cheesecake Labs

named leaders, thin discovery page

Score: 6 of 12. Suits: companies that want strategy folded into a larger nearshore build, with teams in San Francisco and Brazil.

Verifiable: its about page gives 2013 as its founding year and names its CEO, CTO and CFO. Its homepage promises to map scope, architecture, risks and a timeline in weeks, and names work for MoneyGram Wallet and Wedgewood.

Not verifiable: the product definition page I fetched described agentic AI delivery rather than a discovery scope, so the offer scores 1. The named work is modernization builds. Its homepage counters and Clutch claims are its own.

Visit Cheesecake Labs

9

Goji Labs

Los Angeles address, strategy-first positioning

Score: 6 of 12. Suits: startups and nonprofits in Los Angeles that want a strategy sprint before design and build.

Verifiable: its about page gives 2014 as its founding year, an address at 800 Wilshire Boulevard and named co-founders David Barlev (CEO) and Adam Sumner (CTO). Its product strategy page describes a focused sprint that delivers clarity on features, risks and opportunities in weeks.

Not verifiable:the sprint's deliverables and duration aren't listed, and case studies such as KCRW and Root Insurance don't describe the strategy work separately. No price, no IP terms.

Visit Goji Labs

10

Rootstrap

a discovery sprint without names attached

Score: 4 of 12. Suits: product companies that want a short AI or design discovery before a nearshore build.

Verifiable: its how we work page offers an AI and design discovery sprint of auditing, scoping and prototyping, and its about page gives 2011 as its founding year. Its work page names MasterClass, Brightwheel and Madison Reed.

Not verifiable: no leaders named on the pages I checked, no price, no IP terms, and the named work is described as builds. A 4 is the streetlight effect, not a verdict.

Visit Rootstrap App Store

A discovery phase should end with documents another team could build from. If it doesn't, it was a sales process.

Put the published scopes side by side and a common core appears. Netguru's list is the most complete, Atomic Object's the most candid about duration, Headway's the most explicit about format. Merge them and you get six things.

1. 1.A written problem statement: who the user is, what job they're hiring the app for, and what must be true for the business to work.
2. 2.A prioritized feature list for version one, with the things you're deliberately not building written down too.
3. 3.A technical feasibility view: platforms, integrations, data, and the one or two technical risks that could sink the project.
4. 4.Wireframes or a clickable prototype, ideally put in front of a handful of real users.
5. 5.A phased plan with effort estimates, precise enough to price a build.
6. 6.A walkthrough, live, with the people who will make the decision.

That sixth item sounds soft. It isn't. Headway's page promises the report is walked through live with your team, and I think that's the most underrated line on this whole list. A 40-page PDF nobody reads is a common way for discovery money to disappear.

Now the ownership question. Every one of those six deliverables is a document or a design file. If the contract doesn't say you own them, you might find that the plan you paid for can't legally be handed to the cheaper builder you prefer. Seven of ten firms on this list are silent on this in public. That doesn't mean their contracts are bad. It means you have to ask.

If you want to see what the same scope looks like when it flows straight into a build, our MVP development service page publishes the phases: a discovery workshop of 3 to 5 days, rapid prototyping of 1 to 2 weeks, a lean development sprint of 3 to 6 weeks and a launch of 3 to 5 days, with price tiers from $15,000. Use it as a benchmark, not a recommendation.

One downside of any discovery: it front-loads cost before you have software. For a founder with $40,000 total, spending $6,000 or more on planning feels like a lot. The arithmetic in the worked budget below is my argument for why it usually isn't, but the feeling is fair.

The rank matters less than the fit. A 6 that matches your situation beats an 11 that doesn't.

Decide your one non-negotiable first (a budget ceiling for discovery, a regulated industry, a timezone, an existing codebase that needs auditing) and see who survives it. Then compare the survivors on everything else.

Two rows deserve a longer word.

The stuck existing app.This is the most common consulting request I get, and it's different from new-product discovery. You don't need a vision workshop. You need someone to read the code, look at the analytics and tell you whether to fix, refactor or rebuild. Designli's Impact Week and Headway's development track are the two published offers on this list aimed squarely at that. At $1,700 and $6,000 respectively, the audit is cheap relative to the build it might save.

Digital health.Sidebench and thoughtbot both name healthcare strategy work on their own pages (nOCD and Children's Hospital Los Angeles for Sidebench, CloseKnit Health for thoughtbot). Healthcare discovery needs to settle data handling and vendor agreements before feature lists. Ask any finalist whether they sign a business associate agreement, and read what it covers.

If you want the mirror image of this list, ranked on build capacity rather than consulting, see our sibling ranking of enterprise app development companies. A few buyers need both lists, one for the plan and one for the build.

A worked example makes the published prices useful. This one is a scenario, not a client.

Consider a founder with a scheduling app for independent physical therapists. She has $60,000 of savings and angel money set aside for version one, a Figma file she made herself and three clinics willing to pilot. She wants to know whether to spend on discovery or go straight to a build.

Step one: price the discovery against the published numbers. Designli's audit is $1,700, which is about 2.8% of her $60,000. Headway's decisions track is $6,000, which is 10%. Two Headway tracks (decisions and design) would be $12,000, or 20%. Frenchy Digital's discovery and workflow audit, which we quote at $9,000 to $22,000 (a proposal figure, not a price on a public page), would be 15% to about 37%.

Those percentages look expensive until you do the other side of the sum. Suppose discovery shows that one planned feature (say, insurance billing) is out of scope for version one. If that feature would have taken three of ten build weeks, cutting it saves about 30% of the build. On a $50,000 build, that's about $15,000. A $6,000 discovery that finds one feature like that pays for itself about 2.5x.

Of course, that's an assumption. Discovery might find nothing to cut. Then she has paid for confidence and a better estimate, which still has value, but it isn't 2.5x.

Step two: the timeline. Her pilots start in five months, which is about 21 weeks. A two-week discovery plus the MVP phases we publish (roughly 5 to 9 weeks after the workshop) adds to about 7 to 11 weeks. That leaves 10 or more weeks of slack for pilot feedback and a second iteration, which is where early products actually slip.

Step three: the exit clause. Whoever runs discovery, she should confirm in writing that she owns the prototype and plan, so she can take them to a different builder if the build quote is too high. On this list only Chop Dawg says that outright in public, with Headway and Designli close behind on narrower wording.

The downside of this approach: a cheap audit and an expensive discovery aren't the same product. A one-week audit can't validate a market. If her real risk is "do therapists want this", she needs user interviews, and that takes longer than a week.

Several figures kept coming up while I built this list, and none of them should travel as fact.

The first group is studio counters. Funds raised by clients, the share of clients still in business, exits, products launched, rank on a review site. Several ranked firms publish them about their own clients, with no method and no one outside checking. None is in the scores, and I don't repeat the figures.

The second is Clutch-derived pricing. Search summaries gave me hourly rates and minimum project sizes for several of these firms. Clutch blocks automated reading, so I couldn't confirm any of them on the listing, and none appears here.

The third is "average discovery costs X". I found listicles putting typical discovery at one range and typical discovery sprints at another, and one older article on our own site quoted a band for our discovery that no longer matches what we publish today. None of these averages traces to a sample and a method. The three published prices in this article are real because each is one firm's own offer, and that's all they are.

The fourth is outcome rates in case studies: lead growth, churn reduction, accuracy percentages for AI features. They're the firm's own reporting about its own work. They may well be true. They aren't checkable, so they don't rank anyone.

And the old favorite, a percentage of startups that fail for lack of market need, shows up in almost every consulting pitch, including once on our own site. I couldn't tie the circulating version to a random sample with a stated method, so I don't use it to sell discovery. The case for discovery stands on the arithmetic above without it.

Once you have two or three proposals, these are the lines I'd look for first.

• No list of deliverables: If the proposal says 'strategy' without naming the documents and files you'll receive, you can't tell whether you got what you paid for.
• Deliverables not assigned to you: Seven of ten ranked firms publish nothing on ownership. Get a written clause that the plan, prototype and research are yours.
• Discovery priced only as a credit against the build: A credit can be fine, but it makes walking away expensive. Ask for the standalone price too.
• No named people: Consulting is judgment. Ask who runs your workshops and who writes the plan, by name.
• No user contact: A discovery with zero conversations with real users is a requirements document, not validation.
• A conclusion that always matches the firm's stack: If every client of a React Native shop is told to build in React Native, ask for the reasoning in writing.
• No estimate range at the end: Discovery should end with a build estimate precise enough to budget against, or it hasn't finished.
• Counters on slide one: Funds raised and apps launched are marketing. Ask for two past discovery documents with client names removed.

Our own advisory work is described on the startup consulting service page. Hold it to the same list, ours included.

Here is what I chased and couldn't establish, and what could go wrong if you lean on this list too hard.

• Quality of advice: No neutral benchmark of consulting quality exists, and I didn't hire anyone. The ranking measures disclosure, not judgment.
• Contract terms: IP and deliverable ownership usually live in a master services agreement nobody publishes. Absence on a website isn't absence in a contract.
• Leadership currency: Titles on about pages and blog posts can be out of date. thoughtbot's is from 2021.
• Ownership status: Searches found no 2024 to 2026 deals for the ten. That isn't proof. Fueled was excluded because I couldn't settle its status.
• Pages that move: One firm's discovery address redirected to a renamed service, and one firm's product definition page showed different content from a search snippet. I scored what I fetched.
• Rubric authorship: I wrote the rubric and my company competes with these firms. The six attributes are ones I think matter, and another author could weight them differently.

The main risk is that you treat a disclosure score as a quality score and pick the top name without talking to anyone. The cost of that mistake is bounded: the three leaders all sell small, priced first steps ($0 to $6,000), so a bad fit costs you a few thousand dollars and a couple of weeks, not a build.

The opposite risk is that a firm scoring 4 is the best advisor for you and this list talks you out of calling. That one I can't bound, which is why the profiles say what each firm suits rather than only what it scored. If your favorite got a zero somewhere, send the email. One reply can turn a zero into a two.

Frenchy Digital is my company. That's a conflict of interest, and it's why this pick sits outside the scored table and is labelled as mine.

So let me score it the same way, cell by cell. Discovery offer: 2. Our MVP page lists a 3 to 5 day discovery workshop with its contents, and we sell a standalone discovery and workflow audit. Discovery price: 1, not 2. We quote that audit at $9,000 to $22,000 over 2 to 4 weeks, but that band is in our proposals, not on a public page you can open. The only public numbers are the MVP page's project tiers, where the workshop is bundled into a $15,000 to $25,000 starting tier, and the rubric scores project budget ranges as 1. Named strategy work: 2. Our National Dental Association case study documents a discovery and alignment phase with its deliverables. Named leaders: 2. Our about page names both co-founders with titles. IP terms: 2. Section 16 of our published terms transfers ownership of the developed IP to the client, with one condition I'll come back to. Years: 2, since 2016 in France and as a US company since 2019.

That's 11 of 12, the same as Headway. On points we are not ahead of Headway; we are tied with it for first of eleven, and the only thing that separates us is an alphabetical tiebreak (both score 2 on named consulting work and on years), which says nothing about quality. Headway also beats us on the one cell I dropped: it prints its price and we don't. I'd like you to discount even the tie, for a plain reason: I wrote the rubric. I didn't tune it to us (every attribute is one I apply to our own proposals), but a reader shouldn't have to take my word for that, which is why every cell above is something you can open.

Now the condition. Our terms and conditions make the transfer of IP to the client conditional on full payment, and the same document lets ownership revert to us for non-payment and keeps our pre-existing and generic code ours. That's common in our industry, but it's a condition, and you should know it before you sign rather than after.

What proves it. For the National Dental Association, the case study describes a secure off-boarding from the previous agency, then a discovery and alignment phase with stakeholder sessions, a content inventory, user journey mapping and technical mapping of integrations. The deliverables it lists are a project brief with success criteria, a sitemap draft, a legacy URL inventory for redirects and a member platform requirements outline. Then came wireframes, a design system, a WordPress to Webflow rebuild and a member platform. That's a discovery that turned into a build, which is the shape most of our consulting takes.

Why it's still my pick, for one kind of buyer.If you want a discovery priced in writing before work starts, senior people running it, a fixed-price phased proposal for the build within 5 business days and full source code and IP ownership at the end, that's precisely what we sell. We're a senior-led, Black-owned app and AI agency in Los Angeles, with a 30-day post-launch warranty, and we sign BAAs for healthcare clients.

Run the same arithmetic I ran for the others, using our quoted band. It starts at 1.5x Headway's single $6,000 track and about 5.3x Designli's $1,700 audit. Its top, $22,000, is about 3.7x a single Headway track. That's the honest positioning: not the cheapest first step on this list, and priced as a multi-week engagement rather than a one-week audit.

You can get from this page to a signed discovery in about a week.Here's the order I'd do it in.

1. 1.Write one sentence describing the decision you need made (build or not, fix or rebuild, which platform, what goes in version one). Use the buyer-type table to cut this list to three firms that sell that kind of decision.
2. 2.Open each finalist's discovery page and write down the deliverables and the price, or 'not published'. Email the ones without a price and ask for the standalone discovery fee, separate from any build credit.
3. 3.Send all three the same four requests: the named people who will run your discovery, a sample deliverable with the client's name removed, the clause that assigns the deliverables to you, and a build estimate format they commit to at the end. Note who answers all four.

Whoever answers those four cleanly is probably your consultant. Time to send the emails.