Depending on your business and your services, $1,000 might be insanely low. (That's like 4-5 hours at a reasonable consulting rate... can you build out function

Depending on your business and your services, $1,000 might be insanely low. (That's like 4-5 hours at a reasonable consulting rate... can you build out functional requirements in that time?) The point is to give your client more data and an off-ramp, and works well for frank discussions (and ghosting your competitors): "As you know, websites can be $1k or $1M. Based on this, I think you're in the $100k range. But until we get down into the details of exactly what you want to do, it's hard to say for sure, right? So I could do what a lot of firms do and bid $100k: if I'm high, I keep the difference. If I'm low, I surprise you with a change order. That's not how I do business. So if we're in the same range, let's start slow, figure out exactly what you want to do, not lock you into some giant contract with me, and give you better data to move forward with confidence."