The studio's own tool refused to endorse its pricing.
Nobody had written down what an hour of the only person in the studio costs, so no margin claim on any service at any price was verifiable. That was a fair objection, and this is what it changed.
It does the work like an agency and leaves you the machine.
The positioning sits between the two things a small business is usually offered: an agency that keeps the knowledge, and software that hands you an empty screen. The belief underneath it is written down — a studio that only advises leaves when the invoice is paid, so the parts that can be written down get written down, and then they belong to the client.
Twenty-nine services in ten groups, two larger pieces with pages of their own, and a software line of which two are open and four are being built. Nothing being built carries a price, because there is not one yet.
- Relationship to the work
- Executed, as founder
- Where
- Panchkula, India. Work digital, delivery remote
- Sells to
- The owner doing their own marketing; the founder with nobody to ask; the agency owner
- Status
- Live; payments in test mode by its own record
services, each with its own starting price
pricing markets, India baseline and floor
rungs on the ladder, smallest first
spread in the day rate the catalogue implies
India is the baseline and the floor.
A visitor from a market where professional services cost more pays that market's rate. A visitor from a market at or below Indian rates pays the Indian baseline. The multiplier is never below one, so the floor is a rule in code rather than a hope about discounting.
The rule
Multiplier floor 1.0
Twenty-one markets. United States 3.5×, United Kingdom 3.2×, Canada and Australia and Germany 3.0×, South Africa 1.4×, Brazil 1.3×.
The ledger does not move
The storefront shows local currency so the number means something to the reader. Charging is always in rupees, and the rupee figure is displayed too.
The line that localises rather than converts
You don't need ₹50,000 to start looking professional.
A reader in the United States sees $5,000 — not a converted price, but what a traditional agency in that market realistically charges for a brand and website package. The code says exactly that, in a comment.
Flagged by its own author
The multipliers are founder estimates
The code calls the exchange rates indicative and due for quarterly review; the handover records that the multipliers were never reviewed as a business decision. They are not researched figures.
Upsell, never quietly downgrade.
+25% when services from one package are bought separately
- With the package recommended beside them.
- The obvious alternative — notice the overlap and silently charge the package price — reads as generous and is the worse rule: it overrides a choice somebody made, invisibly.
- So the premium is the direction the system may move in. It can offer the cheaper bundle. It cannot apply it for you.
Unlocked only after the referrer's own first paid order
- The unlock condition is what stops a referral programme becoming a signup programme. Somebody who has never bought has nothing to recommend.
- A quarterly cap bounds the liability without needing anybody to notice abuse and intervene.
- Both rules live in the database. If a rule can be bypassed by editing JavaScript in devtools, it is in the wrong place.
The tool said no, and it was right.
- Before
- A US campaign was put to the studio's own strategist. It came back rejecting the plan as hard to reverse on thin evidence, with two objections.
- What forced it
- One survived the rewrite intact: nobody has written down what an hour of the only person in the studio costs, so no margin claim on any service at any price is verifiable.
- The decision
- The ledger held ₹390 for the month — thirty-two entries, every one of them AI generation, and nothing else. Over roughly a hundred billable hours that is about ₹4 an hour, so the direct cost of delivering work is negligible and the cost is the time. The rate was then set at ₹1,200 an hour, written in one place, with the instruction that changing it means changing that number and nothing else.
- What it changed
- The commit record shows both halves landing on 29 September 2026: hours logged as they happen, so the rate stops being a guess, and an hour of the founder's time getting a number. The rate's useful form is not a figure to quote but a budget to check against — how long each service may take before it stops paying.
The price list had already decided, and nobody had read it back.
Every service carries a price; the same file carries the working days it is expected to take. Divide one by the other and the catalogue says what a day of the founder's time has already been sold for — a figure never set deliberately, because the two halves were set separately.
| Line | Per working day | Per hour at 8h |
|---|---|---|
| Chain Partner plan | ₹10,000 | ₹1,250 |
| Chain package, Partner plan | ₹5,000 | ₹625 |
| Growth package | ₹3,810 | ₹476 |
| Google Business Profile | ₹2,667 | ₹333 |
| Median across 27 services | ₹2,400 | ₹300 |
| Brand Identity | ₹1,786 | ₹223 |
| Website Maintenance | ₹1,333 | ₹167 |
| SEO | ₹1,071 | ₹134 |
A 9.3-times spread between the best-paid day and the worst, and the worst-paid line is also the one with an open-ended ongoing commitment. The timelines are elapsed working days, the turnaround promised rather than hours worked, so the table is a floor and not the real rate.
The same job, three and a half times the time budget.
The same brand identity is ₹25,000 in India and $989 in the United States, which is ₹87,500 at the site's own multiplier. At ₹1,200 an hour that is not a margin observation — it is a time budget, and it is a stronger argument than any discount, because it requires charging the published rate and doing the same work.
hours of headroom in India
₹25,000 at ₹1,200 an hour. Enough, and it is the whole budget.
hours of headroom in the United States
The same work at the studio's own published US rate.
what that market's published guides quote for small-business brand identity
Every Indizilla figure sits under the bottom of its range.
What is not known.
- A $499 US price ceiling shipped and was withdrawn in full the same day, on the founder's instruction — a cap is a discount wearing a different hat, and it argues against the position the studio actually holds
- The campaign was rewritten around prices that were already published, which took hours rather than weeks and is recorded rather than quietly deleted
- Overheads are not recorded — rent, equipment, internet, phone, subscriptions — so ₹4 an hour is true and incomplete, and ₹1,200 is a judgement rather than a computed floor
- Billable hours a month are assumed, not measured. One hundred is a guess
- The 9.3-times spread is unresolved: either SEO is underpriced or Chain Partner is overpriced, and the catalogue says both
- No competitor set is recorded anywhere in the repository, search volumes are unmeasured, and the stage ladder was set by judgement and never tested
- No revenue, customers or outcomes: payments ran in test mode by the project's own record
- The claims register records that the studio is not registered for GST while the Marketing OS plans table prints two plans as tax-inclusive; the two do not agree and neither is asserted here
Read the full study.
Twelve panels, ending on what could not be verified.