Tech stack consulting: decide before you spend

TL;DR: Tech stack consulting here is one paid week, $2,500, that ends with a written decision on what your store runs on, what each option costs in year one and year three, and what to leave alone. The week is credited to the build if you go ahead, and the document is yours either way.

A platform choice is paid once. Everything that follows it, the rent, the changes, the workarounds, is paid every week for as long as the store trades. Tech stack consulting moves that choice in front of the spending instead of behind it: one week of work, one written page, a price beside each option and a reason beside each price.

This page is about buying that week well. What it contains, what it costs, what you own when it ends, and how to tell whether the advice is neutral. We work from a studio at 78 SW 7th Street in Brickell, in English and in Spanish, on site across South Florida, and we sell the decision before we sell anything else.

A comparison is free, and it is worth what it costs. It carries no owner, no date and no trigger, so the argument inside your own building survives it. What we write carries all three: a name beside the decision, a date at the foot of the page, and the single event that would reopen it.

What this includes

Most ecommerce technology consulting stops at a comparison. Three shapes of week sit inside this practice, and only one of them is about choosing a platform. The first measures the store you are running now, which is the week that measures the store you run today. The second is platform selection: deciding what that store should run on, and how the decision itself is written down is the offer that takes it further than this page can. The third turns the decision into pages, accounts and a sequence of work, and only starts once something has been signed.

You are buying the second shape here, and what you own at the end of it is short and specific:

• The written decision itself, one page, dated, with the name of the person who answers for it.
• The two or three options that genuinely fit your store. Not a catalogue of every platform on the market.
• What each option costs you in year one and in year three, including the parts that arrive every month whether anything is being built or not.
• A written list of what we are not going to touch. If an address brings you orders today, it stays exactly as it is.
• The name of the person who holds the data, the domain and the billing, in your company rather than in ours.
• A reversal trigger beside each decision: the one event that would reopen it, agreed before anyone starts work.

What is deliberately not in the week: a slide deck you have to translate for your own partner, a recommendation that ignores the option of changing nothing, and any option we would be paid to build and you would not. That last point is the whole argument, so it is worth a test of its own. Ask any advisor three questions before you pay: which option they would not be paid to build, what their advice costs on its own, and whether the same firm would quote the rebuild afterwards. An advisor who answers all three is telling you how they will behave once you have paid, and a Miami storefront, judged on the same numbers, is where those answers become visible.

How it works

The week is a week, not the first slice of a larger engagement. It starts on a Monday your calendar allows and it produces a document on the Friday, whether or not you continue with us.

1. The decision week, one week, $2,500. We read what you run today, talk to the people who run it, and put your own numbers on each option. You end the week with the written decision and the price of what would follow.
2. Architecture, one week, $2,500, credited in full to the build. The chosen option becomes pages, accounts and a sequence of work you can hold us to.
3. Build, from $5,000, over two to ten weeks. Only if the decision was to move. You see the work running on a link of your own every week, and nothing is added that the decision did not ask for.
4. The move itself, if you already trade. Carrying an order book and a customer list from one place to another is moving a live store without losing its addresses, and every address that brings traffic today is checked afterwards, one by one.
5. Care, monthly, from $1,500. Monitoring, small changes and a person who answers when something breaks on a Saturday.

The week asks something of your side as well, and it is small enough to plan around: roughly a day and a half of attention across the five mornings, mostly from whoever runs the store day to day, and a decision maker in the room at the end for the signature. That is why the week fits inside a normal trading week instead of stopping the business for it.

What the week is not is a survey of the market. We come back with the one or two options that survive contact with your catalogue, your busiest day and your team, and we say plainly which we would choose with our own money.

What it costs

Prices below are where each phase starts; your scoped quote fixes the exact scope, the price and the timeline.

• Decision week: $2,500 for one week, credited in full against the build if you continue.
• Architecture: $2,500 for one week, credited the same way.
• Build: from $5,000, priced stage by stage so that stopping after the first stage is a real option rather than a warning.
• The move, if you are already trading: priced inside the build, with the address work counted as its own line.
• Care: from $1,500 a month, and only if you want it.

The figure people forget is the one that arrives every month whether or not anything is being built. Whichever option you choose will charge you rent, and what one option rents from you every month is published by the platform itself, as is the same monthly line on the second option. Two options can look identical on the day you sign and then differ by thousands of dollars a year later, which is exactly why the decision is priced as a week of work and not as a percentage of whatever you spend afterwards. It keeps the advice honest: we are paid for the week, not for the size of what follows it.

There is no form on this page asking you to ask for a price. The numbers are here, and the published price of every phase is where the whole sequence sits on one page.

Proof

Food By Box runs 2,500 products, and its speed score from Google came out at 95. Monthly visits climbed from 20,000 to 500,000 in 24 months, and every address that was already bringing visitors in was kept when the store moved.

An independent artist's shop was the harder test. On a phone, a page that took just under five seconds to appear now appears in a little over one second, and nothing the store ranked for was lost.

Both of those numbers are the two things a platform decision can destroy. A move that drops the addresses a store spent years earning, or that leaves the shop slower than it was before, is a decision that cost money instead of saving it. Both were measured before the work started and counted again in the client's own records afterwards, which is the discipline this week applies to a choice as well. The numbers behind both projects are published in full, including the parts that went slowly.

The person who writes the plan and reads the work before it ships is who writes the plan and signs off the build, Michael Agnassia, after 15 years in e-commerce. The studio is at 78 SW 7th Street in Brickell, we work in English and in Spanish, and we are on site across South Florida.

Questions

What does tech stack consulting cost, and how long does it take?

$2,500 for one week. That week ends with a written decision, a price beside each option and a date underneath it, and the $2,500 is credited to the build if you continue with us. Nothing else is charged unless you decide to go further.

Why pay for tech stack consulting instead of asking three agencies for proposals?

Three proposals tell you what three vendors want to sell you. A paid week gives you a comparison that includes the option of changing nothing, and the document is yours whatever you decide next. We are also paid for the week rather than for the size of the build that follows it, which is the difference between advice and a sales document.

How do we know your recommendation is not just an argument for a rebuild?

Ask whether the same firm would quote the rebuild. We would, and the price of the option we would not be paid to build is written on the same page as the price of the one we would. If the evidence points at changing nothing, that is a written result too, and a good one.

What do we actually own at the end of the week?

The document, dated and signed, and the accounts: the domain, the hosting and the billing stay in your name, and the name of the person in your company who can export your own customer list is written into the decision.

What happens if we disagree with the recommendation?

You keep a written argument you can test, with the numbers that produced it, and the fee is still credited if you ask us to build something else. We would rather you changed your mind in the week than after a move.

Can you start from the store we already run instead?

That is a different week: it measures the system in place rather than the choice in front of you, and it answers its own question, repair or rebuild. The two can follow each other, in that order.

What if we decide to do nothing at all?

Then you have a page that says so, with the owner of the data named and the trigger that would reopen each decision. A store that is already fast and already paid for does not need a new platform, and saying that costs less than any rebuild.

Next

• The week ends with a written decision, a price per option and a date, whether or not you build anything.
• The week is booked as a week and not as an open-ended engagement: pick a week that suits your calendar and we confirm the dates and the scope of that decision week.
• If the honest answer is that the store you run is already the right one, that is what the document will say.

Sources

• Google on the speed targets a store is held to
• Shopify on what a hosted plan charges every month
• BigCommerce on the same monthly line, on the other side of the choice