When not to hire us

We get inquiries every week from prospective clients. Some of them are a fit. Many of them aren't — not because the project is bad, but because we're the wrong studio for it. Here's when we'll tell you that on the kickoff call, in writing, and try to point you somewhere better.

If you need a $2,000 website

Our floor is higher than that. A custom Next.js marketing site from us is a low-five-figure project, and a full e-commerce or app build is well above that. If your budget is "a few thousand for a small site," you're not looking for a custom build — you're looking for a Squarespace template with a careful designer for two days, and you'll get further faster going that route.

We'd rather tell you that than quote a number we can't deliver against.

If you need ongoing daily content updates from a non-technical team

We default to MDX in the repo for content. That works for a small operator who edits the site quarterly. It does not work for a marketing team with three writers pushing daily posts and needing draft review, scheduled publish, and rich-media authoring. That's a CMS-shaped problem, and you want a studio that's done a hundred Sanity or Payload integrations, not us.

If you need an agency to manage your marketing

We build things. We don't run paid acquisition campaigns, manage social, write blog posts on retainer, or do brand strategy decks. If those are what you're hiring, you're looking for a marketing agency, and we'll happily refer you to one of the local Oklahoma City shops that does that well.

If the project requires HIPAA, SOC 2, or PCI compliance the platform doesn't already cover

We use platforms whose compliance posture covers most of what we ship — Stripe is PCI, Supabase has SOC 2 Type II, etc. But if your project has compliance requirements that go beyond "build on a compliant platform" — your own audit, your own attestation, your own internal controls program — that is its own discipline, and it's not a discipline we hold ourselves out as experts in. We'll be honest about what we do and don't cover, and we'll tell you when you need a different studio or an in-house team.

If the project is rescuing a failing build from another agency

Maybe. Sometimes we take this work; sometimes we don't. The honest answer depends on the codebase. If the inherited code is on stack we know (Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Shopify Storefront), we can usually pick it up. If it's on something exotic — a custom PHP framework, a Bubble app at the edge of its limits, a legacy Drupal install — we'll tell you what it would take to rebuild instead, because sometimes that's the cheaper path. And sometimes it isn't. We'll look before we quote.

If you want a partner who'll absorb shifting scope without raising the price

This one is awkward to say plainly, but it matters. Our fixed-price model works because scope is documented, and changes to scope produce written mini-quotes. If what you actually want is a flexible, all-included "keep building until I'm happy" arrangement, that's a real thing some agencies offer, but it's not what we do. The pricing reflects the discipline; if the discipline isn't what you're looking for, the pricing won't match either.

If you're looking for the cheapest bid

We almost always lose to the cheapest bid. We're not low-cost. We're fixed-cost, written-down, and predictable — but that doesn't make us the cheapest line on a procurement spreadsheet. If the deciding factor is "lowest number wins," you'll get a better answer from a freelancer marketplace than from us, and we'd rather you save the time.

Why this is on the blog

Most agency sites are written like every prospect is a fit. They aren't, and pretending otherwise wastes the prospect's time. We'd rather over-disqualify on the first call, recommend someone better when we can, and earn the projects that are an actual fit. If you read this list and your project isn't on it, the next step is the contact form.