Discovery Phase
A short, fixed-price engagement (Wavect: 2 to 3 weeks, 3,500 EUR) that ends with a signed architecture, milestone plan, and a fixed-price build offer.
Discovery is the work that has to happen before a fixed-price build can be quoted honestly. It produces four artifacts: a software architecture, a milestone plan, the critical technical flows, and a launch plan. From those, the vendor can quote a real fixed price and write a defensible SoW.
Wavect runs discovery as a 2 to 3 week fixed-price engagement at 3,500 EUR. If you continue with us for the build, the discovery fee is deducted from the first invoice. If you do not, you keep all four artifacts and can take them to another vendor. That last point is the test of an honest discovery: the output should be useful even if you walk away.
Worked example of why this matters: a founder collects three “free” quotes for the same app and gets 30k, 70k, and 110k. The spread is not vendor greed, it is that none of them actually scoped the work, so each padded for a different set of imagined unknowns. A paid discovery collapses that spread by replacing guesses with an architecture and a milestone plan, which is also what an honest SDLC starts from. The same artifacts let you tell the difference between an MVP you can ship in eight weeks and a platform you are quietly committing to for a year.
The reason we charge for discovery: free scoping work is either dishonest (the vendor recovers the cost in the build estimate) or low-quality (the vendor rushes it because it is not paid). Charging fixes the incentive. The honest trade-off is that discovery feels like spending money before you have anything to show. You do have something: the four artifacts are a portable asset, and the alternative (committing six figures to a build nobody scoped) is the expensive option, not the cheap one.
Related: Fractional CTO Austria lists Discovery as one of four pricing tiers.