Pricing
Collaborative Excellence in Design
Fixed-fee on most engagements. Hourly only when scope is genuinely undefined. No retainer games, no scope-creep surprises.
Free consultation · no retainer · same-day response
Engagement tiers
Most projects fit cleanly into one of three lanes. We quote off the lane that matches your scope, not off a per-square-foot rate sheet.
TIER.01
Starting at $2,500
Fixed-fee · 1–2 weeks
ADUs, additions, simple residential, owner-builder pre-permit clarity.
RECOMMENDED
TIER.02
Starting at $8,500
Fixed-fee · 3–5 weeks
Custom homes, full residential, small commercial tenant improvements.
TIER.03
Starting at $22,500
Fixed-fee or hourly at $145/hr · 6–12 weeks
Multifamily, mid-rise commercial, complex code analysis, phased work.
Add-ons
Priced per scope at quote time. Most add 5–20% on top of the base tier. We tell you the number before you commit.
Photorealistic exteriors and key interior shots. Two revisions included.
Compressed schedule with weekend hours. Subject to studio capacity.
Off-hours phone + portal response for tight construction calendars.
Full bilingual title block, sheet notes, and shop drawings.
Clean change-order packages with sign-off and as-built deltas.
Construction-phase RFI batching with same-day weekday response.
What’s not included
We do not stamp structural, MEP, or civil — those need licensed engineers and we keep that work in the engineers’ hands. We coordinate sub-consultants for you and pass through their fees at cost, with no markup. The same applies to surveys, soils reports, and specialty consultants. You see every invoice. We are happy to recommend the engineers we trust most in the Valley.
What your fee actually buys
A permit-ready set, an inspector's clean pass, and a building under construction.
FAQ
Fixed-fee on roughly 80% of engagements — Schematic, Permit-Ready, and most Full Documentation jobs are quoted as a single number with milestones. We use hourly ($145/hr) only when the scope is genuinely undefined, like exploratory feasibility work or open-ended code research.
Schematic includes one revision round. Permit-Ready includes two. Full Documentation is generally three plus all plan-check correction cycles. Beyond that, revisions are billed hourly at $145/hr against a written change order — never a surprise invoice.
Yes — typically 25% to start, 50% at schematic milestone, balance at permit submittal. We use Stripe and ACH inside the client portal. No checks unless you really want to.
Yes — we draw permit-ready sets nationwide. Our home base is Phoenix; we work in every U.S. state, with deep familiarity in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Ohio. We will not take a project where we cannot speak credibly to the local AHJ — that is a recipe for permit delay and we tell you when it is the case.
Project communication, intake, contracts, and the client portal are available in English, Spanish, and Chinese at no extra charge — that is how we run the studio. A fully translated documentation set (sheet notes, specs, shop drawings) is an add-on because it adds drafting hours.
COMMON CONCERNS
Some are excellent. The risk isn't the drawing quality — it's the back-end. When the AHJ requests a correction at 4pm on a Wednesday, the offshore drafter is asleep and your construction calendar is held up two weeks. When your GC asks "what's the framing detail at the gable end," they need an answer in the next hour, not the next morning. Our fixed fee bundles the corrections, the GC follow-ups, the AHJ resubmittal, the schedule slippage you don't have to absorb. If your project is small and the schedule is loose, offshore is genuinely cost-effective. For anything on a contract calendar, it isn't.
If they have one in-house, that's often the right answer — they're embedded in the project and know the trades. The cases where firms hire us instead of using a GC's drafter: (1) the GC is bidding the project and needs an unbiased drawing set, (2) the GC's drafter is overloaded, (3) the AHJ has rejected the GC's sets before and the project needs a clean third-party submittal. None of those are "the GC's drafter is bad" — they're scheduling and bias issues.
Nothing extra — two rounds of revisions before CD freeze are bundled into the fixed fee, and AHJ corrections after submittal are bundled too. The only revision that's billed extra is substantive scope change after CD freeze (you decide to add a second floor, change the cuisine for a restaurant TI, etc.). Those are quoted transparently before the work starts.
For projects where the scope is well-defined (TI, ADU, custom home from a clear program brief, multifamily from a sketch), fixed fee is usually 30–40% less expensive than hourly because there's no incentive for the drafter to take longer. For projects that genuinely need exploration (a renovation where the as-builts are wrong, a heritage building where we're negotiating with planning every week), hourly is more honest. We default to fixed fee and switch to hourly only when the scope demands it — and we tell you upfront.
Plan-check corrections are bundled — we respond at no extra fee. If the AHJ rejects the package for a substantive reason that was in our scope to catch (we missed a code requirement, mis-specified a detail), we revise at no extra fee until it passes. The only AHJ rejections we don't cover for free are those triggered by client decisions made after CD freeze (you changed something) or by AHJ scope expansion (the reviewer asks for a new structural calc that wasn't required at submittal). Those get quoted transparently.
Yes — typical schedule is 30% on contract sign, 40% at construction-docs milestone, 30% at permit issuance. For larger multifamily / commercial projects we sometimes structure four payments around schematic / DD / CD / issuance. Card, ACH, or check; we don't accept crypto.
Stamps (architect or engineer, when required), specialty consultant fees (geotech, civil, landscape, low-voltage), permit fees themselves (paid to the AHJ, not us), as-built measurement (itemized), and 3D renderings beyond what we produce for the architectural set (we partner with a renderer when needed). Every itemized cost is named on the quote — no surprises at invoice time.
Contact
Studio
Phoenix4435 E Chandler Blvd · Suite 200
Phone
(602) 628-1231Servicios disponibles en español · 中文版本 (602) 628-1231
