Discovery
A small paid first phase where you work out what the real project is, so the scope and price stop being a guess.
See it
What it is
Discovery is a short, separately priced engagement whose only deliverable is certainty: what the client actually needs, what it will take, and what it should cost. You sell the map before you sell the expedition. Typical output is a written brief plus a scoped estimate, sometimes wireframes, a technical audit, or a content inventory.
Reach for it whenever the ask is vague ('we need a new site'), the stakeholders disagree with each other, or the honest estimate spans a 3x range. Price it as a real project (commonly 5 to 15 percent of the expected build), give it a fixed fee and a fixed end date, and let the client walk away with the deliverable even if they hire someone else. That last part is what makes it worth paying for.
Gotcha: free discovery is just unpaid scoping, and it trains clients to treat your thinking as a sales cost. The other trap is discovery with no fixed end: keep it to one or two weeks, or it quietly becomes the project without a contract behind it.
Ask AI for it
Draft a paid discovery phase proposal for this engagement: a one paragraph restatement of the client's problem in their own words, a list of discovery activities (stakeholder interviews, technical audit, content inventory, competitive review), the concrete deliverables the client keeps (written project brief, scoped requirements, phased estimate with ranges, recommended approach), a fixed two-week timeline with named milestones, a fixed fee, and a line stating the discovery fee credits toward the build if they proceed. Keep it under one page.