For a year I sold one thing on a fixed menu: a marketing site, blog, or docs site, built in Astro, live in one to three weeks, for a flat fee. Self-hosted — the client pays for their own domain. Here's the honest ledger.

What converted

Flat fees convert because they remove the scariest question a non-technical buyer has: how much will this end up costing me? "It's this number, it's done in three weeks, here's exactly what's included" closed deals that an hourly rate never would.

What killed the margin

Scope creep, every time, dressed as "just one small thing." The fix wasn't saying no — it was writing the boundary into the offer: three content templates, two rounds of revisions, anything past that is a new line item. The clients who respected that were the ones worth keeping.

Would I do it again

Yes, with one change: a deposit before the design phase, not after. Static sites at a flat fee are a genuinely good deal for the right client and a genuinely bad one for the indecisive. The offer is the filter.