Vibe coders doing client work: how do you price a build, fixed fee, hourly, or ongoing retainer?
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When an AI-assisted build takes a weekend instead of three weeks, hourly pricing starts to feel like it punishes you for being fast. But a fixed fee gets scary the moment the client keeps asking for “one more tweak”, and a retainer only works if they actually need ongoing changes.
For those of you building apps or tools for clients with AI coding tools: how do you price it now? Did you change how you charge once your build time dropped, and how do you explain the price to a client who knows it “only took a few days”?
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a fixed fee on a weekend AI build seems to fall apart once the client wants all the edge cases cleaned up. do you spell out how many revision rounds are included, or leave that for later?
Mid-task the agent lost context and rebuilt a helper that already existed two files away under a different name. Hunting down that duplicate logic is unbillable cleanup. On a fixed fee, you eat the cost of an agent quietly reinventing its own codebase.