This brief branches on what you need built and asks only the questions that change the number. Every one of them says what it does to the quote. A person reads it and comes back with a written scope and a fixed price, or with the honest answer that we are the wrong supplier. Reply inside one business day with a stated budget, two without. Delivery is 21 days on every agent lane, and the form costs nothing and starts no sales sequence.
Why would this go badly, and what stops it?
"I paid an agency before and got a login and a slide deck." — That is the median outcome in this market, and nothing on a sales page distinguishes the suppliers who do it from the ones who do not. What removes it: A fixed written scope before any money moves, work done in a repository you can watch, and 30 days to take the build fee back if what ships is not what the scope said.
"I will have no idea whether it is actually working." — Most AI deployments are evaluated by vibes, and the supplier is the only one holding the transcripts. What removes it: Evaluation suites that run before launch and after every change, and every transcript, run and outcome in your own dashboard rather than ours.
"It will sound like a robot and embarrass me in front of my customers." — It will if nobody budgets for latency and barge-in, and plenty of builds do not. What removes it: You hear it and sign off on the script before it takes a single real call, and the latency budget is written into the scope rather than discovered afterwards.
"I will be stuck with you." — Most of this category is built so that leaving means starting over, and that is a commercial decision the supplier made on purpose. What removes it: Source, prompts, schemas and transcripts are exportable on day one, on a month-to-month agreement with no minimum term.
"I do not have time to project-manage this." — Every implementation that fails, fails because it quietly became the owner's second job. What removes it: You are asked for decisions, not deliverables. On the agent lane that is three touchpoints total; on a platform build it is a weekly half hour with someone who can actually decide.
"The price will double once you are inside." — Change orders are how this industry makes its margin back, and the number on the proposal is often not the number on the invoice. What removes it: The ladder is published from $99 to $150,000, the scope document is the contract, and anything outside it is quoted before it is built.
"This will take half a year." — On a mid-market programme it does — the published market band for one starts at a six-month minimum. On a production platform, honestly, it should. What removes it: On the agent lane, 21 days or the build fee comes back. On the lines where six months is the real answer we say six months, and the scope carries dated milestones you can hold us to.
What are you actually risking?
Live in 21 days, or the build fee comes back. Measured from the kickoff call, against the scope document we both signed. Not from when you return the questionnaire, not from when procurement clears — from kickoff. The boundary: This one is the agent lane. A platform build is measured in months and the scope carries dated milestones instead; promising 21 days on a $150,000 system would be a lie told to win a deal. The exception on every lane is an integration you did not tell us about at kickoff.
30 days to change your mind. If what ships does not match the spec we agreed, we refund the full build fee and you keep the artefacts. No clawback argument, no attribution dispute. The boundary: The build fee. Retainer months already delivered are not refunded.
You own it from day one. Source, prompts, schemas and transcripts export on request from the first day of the build. Month to month, no minimum term, no exit fee. The boundary: Third-party platform accounts stay on their own vendors' terms — we can hand you the keys, we cannot rewrite Twilio's contract.
We will tell you not to buy. Each of the six lines publishes who it is wrong for, and those lists are real. If your volume is under a few hundred minutes a month, a $49/mo packaged receptionist is the correct purchase. If a configured off-the-shelf tool solves it, we would rather lose the build than sell you one you did not need. The boundary: This is not modesty. A client who should not have bought is a refund, a bad reference and a support burden, and we would rather lose the deal on the call.
Who should not buy this?
Five situations where we are the wrong call, published because a supplier who says yes to everyone has told you nothing by saying yes to you. Buyers who want a guaranteed revenue number. We guarantee delivery, dates and ownership. We will not guarantee an outcome we have no instrumentation to measure. Anyone who needs it live this week. A done-for-you build is measured in weeks, and on the software line in months, and we will not pretend otherwise to win the deal. Teams with an in-house engineer who wants to own the build. You will move faster than us and you should. Projects with no decision-maker available weekly. Custom software dies from unanswered questions faster than from hard problems. Regulated deployments needing signed BAAs on day one. Say so on the call and we will tell you honestly whether the timeline survives it.