The Rationed Question

Half of that is a genuinely better client, and he earned it the expensive way. Showing up with the documents sorted beats handing someone a shoebox at $425 an hour, whatever the billing arrangement. So the meter teaches something true. Now look at what else it taught, sitting in the same post: “If I did it again I’d save up my questions and send one email a week.”

Two sellers who switch the meter off on purpose

That batching instinct is what the meter taught him, and it is the thing two sellers in the same thread deliberately price around. An attorney posting as L0NZ0BALL described the exemption: “It’s my name on the door, so I personally choose not to bill for anything I do that takes less than 15 minutes.” The reasoning was commercial, not charitable. “You’ll lose lots of clients billing 10 minutes for file retrieval and short emails 3-5 times a month.” They price the expected drip in from the start: “My rates on these cases just assume you’re calling me every 21 days for 10-15 minutes of followup care.”

Someone running an IT services shop, posting as fencepost_ajm, wanted the same thing written into the contract. Every service plan should include a number of “touches,” meaning the five to fifteen minute questions, “because there are situations where I actively want customers to feel free to ask because they’re already paying for that and it helps avoid decisions that will cost more to resolve.”

That last clause is the reason fencepost_ajm gives. A meter lands hardest on short questions, because a short question is the one whose value you cannot judge until after you have asked it. You do not know what the clause you were about to skim is worth until someone tells you, which is exactly why $35 feels like a lot to find out.

Be careful how far that goes, because the evidence is weaker than the argument would like. splitdecisionguide describes deferring and batching, not going without, and he scores it as a win: shorter calls, smaller bills. Nobody in either thread says they had a question and never asked it at all. What we have is two sellers who structure their pricing so the meter is off for small questions, on the stated belief that the delay costs clients more later. That is a design choice by people with money riding on the consequences. It is not a measurement, and nobody has counted the expensive decisions a five minute call would have prevented. Neither have we.

Be equally clear about who funds it, because neither of them is absorbing anything. L0NZ0BALL says so in the quote: the rates “just assume you’re calling me every 21 days.” fencepost_ajm says his customers can ask “because they’re already paying for that.” The cost moves into the rate, which means the client who calls twice a year is funding the one who calls every three weeks. Both sellers took that trade with their eyes open, and if you take it you are choosing a visible meter over an invisible markup, not escaping the cost.

A commenter posting as nevesis pushed the other way, and the point is good. Forwarding one document means an attorney drops a brief, reloads your matter, finds the file, sends it, and reloads the brief: “Those shifts are mentally intensive and time consuming, so they bill you 30 minutes.” If a five minute question really costs thirty minutes of broken attention, the meter is pricing it correctly and the batching is the market working as intended.

Our answer is that the cost nevesis describes belongs to the interruption, not to the question, and the two sellers above each handled it without pricing the question out. L0NZ0BALL takes the interruption and recovers it in the rate. fencepost_ajm goes further and schedules the touches into the plan, which controls when they land. Neither concluded that the client should ask less. A short question is cheap to answer and expensive to be interrupted by, and only one of those is the client’s decision.

Where hourly is still the buyer’s friend

Do not read that as a rule. The sellers are having this argument right now, and the ones burned in the other direction are not wrong. A consultant posting as lilkitty28 opened an r/consulting thread that week saying hourly “punishes me for being efficient.” A commenter posting as NovelFindings named why that complaint got louder this year: a client’s procurement form asked in writing “how do you use AI and how does that affect your hourly rate,” and billing for outcomes let them sidestep it. Then the thread turned on them.

A consultant posting as BabySharkMadness drew the line at scope: flat rates work “if your scope and understanding of the project is solid,” but on novel work, “no solid scope and accurate time estimate? You’re going to lose money on the flat rate projects.” Another, posting as Street_Cheetah1834, named what should keep any fixed-price buyer honest: a fixed fee does not remove the negotiation, and “without clear boundaries, it can just move the negotiation to a point where you’ve already done the extra work.”

Buyers carry their own version of that risk, and it is the cross-subsidy again. A standing monthly number means you pay the same in the quiet month you barely used, and the invoice that stops itemizing hours stops proving what you got. The meter was ugly, but it was evidence. Whatever replaces it owes you a different kind, reported in numbers you already track.

So the honest test is not hourly versus fixed. It is whether the result can be described before the work starts. When it can, a fixed number moves the estimating risk to whoever actually knows how long things take. When it cannot, an hour fairly shares the risk of finding out, and you should be suspicious of anyone quoting a firm price for a problem nobody has scoped, including us. That is what a small paid discovery step is for.

The thing to do this week, which costs nothing

Do not try to remember the questions you swallowed. You cannot, and an exercise built on that is worthless. Use the record instead. Open last quarter’s email to whoever bills you by the hour and find the batched ones, where you saved three things up and sent them together. For each item in each batch, mark how long it had been waiting, and whether a decision it touched had already been made by the time you hit send.

That last column is the whole argument, and it is yours rather than ours. Then take it to your provider and ask for the unmetered band in writing. Some run one already, the way L0NZ0BALL does, and have never mentioned it. If they refuse, you have learned something useful for the price of asking.

Then watch how the band gets funded, because that is where it fails. An unmetered zone nobody is paid for gets rationed invisibly: replies arrive slower, answers get shorter and more hedged, the calendar fills up. That is still a meter, just one you cannot read. Both providers above priced theirs in on purpose, which is the version that survives a busy quarter. If someone offers you unlimited access and charges nothing for it, ask what they plan to do the week it gets expensive.

Hold our answer to that same standard. Our coaching engagements carry one all in monthly number, no hourly rate on the invoice and no egg timer on the channel, with the questions priced into the monthly rate rather than absorbed out of goodwill, because we would rather your team ask the cheap one on a Tuesday than hand us the expensive one in January. Projects are quoted as fixed prices against a written result, and we will say so when a problem is too unformed to price that way. What we cannot tell you is which of your batched questions were the ones that mattered. That part is already written down, in your sent folder, and reading it costs nothing.