When we started Irishvar, the sharpest decision we made was probably the smallest-sounding one: we charge what it costs us to do the work, plus a small margin. Not what a Series-A SaaS would pay. Not what a London agency rate card says. What it costs us.
It's a positioning weapon, not a discount. Here's what a year of doing it has taught us.
How market-rate pricing actually works
Market-rate pricing has two strange consequences. The first is that it shapes who you can serve. If your day rate is set by the upper half of the enterprise market, the lower half — the founders who need senior help most — can't buy you. So you don't sell to them. You sell to the customers who can already afford the price, who are usually the customers who least need the help.
The second is that it pulls every conversation into negotiation theatre. Your published rate is a fiction; the real price is whatever a particular customer can be talked into. The team gets good at the dance and worse at the work.
How cost-based pricing works
We build a simple cost sheet for each engagement: loaded labour cost, infrastructure, overhead, small margin. We share the cost sheet's logic with the founder. The price is what it is. There's no rate card to discount from, no Q4 panic, no compete-with-yourself dynamic.
The hardest part is intellectual: convincing yourself that you don't deserve to capture every dollar of value you create. The agency mindset says yes you do, that's the whole game. We don't agree. We deserve to be paid honestly and to share the upside when the founder wins. That's a different game.
Why founders self-select for it
When we say "cash, equity, or a mix," the founders who choose equity-heavy structures are often the ones who believe in their own outcome. That's a useful signal — and a useful filter. We want clients who think they're going to win. They want a partner who isn't just selling them hours.
What's harder than it looks
Two things. Equity arrangements are administratively heavier than cash ones — vesting schedules, cap tables, secondary frameworks. We learned in the first year that you need a standard template and a fast lawyer; otherwise you spend three weeks arguing about a SAFE-like instrument that should have been a checkbox.
And: cost-based pricing forces real cost discipline internally. You can't paper over inefficiency with a bigger rate card. We've had to be honest about which engagements we run efficiently and which we don't, and rebuild some of our delivery process as a result. That's been good for us — but it's not free.
Three years in we'll know how the bet has played out. So far the founders we want to work with have found us. That's the part we hoped for.