2026-01-20
Speedy Bohemian is inspired by the 'Hermit Model' of tech consulting voiced by the Australian consultancy Hermit Tech.
The industry standard practice for contracting and pricing—charging on an hourly basis across several contractors on constantly slipping deadlines—is virtually designed for abuse: it encourages dishonesty, misrepresentation of timelines, and constant slippage. It does not foster trust between contractor and client.
Speedy Bohemian undertakes engagements on one of two possible plans, one of which can become the other at the request of the client:
Put simply, you have a definite task that needs to be done; a problem solved, system debugged, spec written, application developed, etc. A task with a defined beginning and end.
Under the traditional consulting pricing model, the contractor is inclined to overstate the expected timeline and overstaff the project, in order to reap low-effort revenue while their client is subjected to sunk-cost thinking.
Speedy Bohemian begins instead with Fixed-Price, Fixed-Length contracts for a given engagement. These contracts center around the creation of some final deliverable, along with criteria for the successful delivery. These criteria must be
Specific: Whether the project has fulfilled a criterion must be clearly and objectively testable. If testing success is non-trivial, building those testing conditions should be the first priority.
Achievable: The criteria must be reasonable and achievable given project scope and timeline. When in doubt, be small and concrete. A set of small goals successfully achieved can be extended and iterated on, but an ungainly, oversized goal that demands constant delays and extensions is the touch of death.
Valuable: The kind and magnitude of the value delivered, and to whom the value is delivered, should be clear from the outset. Ideally, the stakeholder who would retain value is directly involved in negotiations.
We do not pretend that planning, forecasting, or projecting deadlines is easy or reliable: to the contrary, it is devilishly difficult, and overconfident timelines have been the doom of many a software project.
However, it does not follow that the only solution is to let projects go on indefinitely.
We advocate for the use of fixed contracts because they give contractors skin in the game: if they go over time and miss the original deadline, they will not receive additional compensation as a reward: they will have to press on and produce the final deliverable at the original price point.
Thus, the consequences for the contractor's bad forecasting falls on the contractor, and their incentives are better aligned with those of the client.
We also advocate for vertical slices, incrementally expanded and delivered for stakeholders to evaluate directly. The more easily and often stakeholders can get hands-on with the ongoing deliverable, the easier it is to mold into its final shape.
Sometimes, you just need on-the-spot help: advice, a quick consultation, exploration. These activities don't have a clear, desired end-goal, and it doesn't help anyone to force them into that mold.
For such needs, Speedy Bohemian LLC also offers ad-hoc hourly or daily contracts at flat rates per contributor.
If the engagement is expected to take more than two days, a daily rather than hourly contract is preferred, and if the engagement is expected to take more than a week, it's generally worthwhile to discuss a fixed-price contract as above.
Note that ongoing maintenance and support for prior deliverables will not be priced as ad-hoc contracts. When necessary, these will be priced as ongoing, flat payments negotiated following original delivery.
We further affirm that all code, data, documentation, presentations, reports, and other material produced in the course of an engagement, either as final deliverable or an intermediary artifact, is the property of the client, not of Speedy Bohemian LLC. Speedy Bohemian LLC takes the role of custodian and developer of this property, shaping and augmenting it until it satisfies the desired specifications of the client.