How to price a project you've never done before

The instinct when pricing unfamiliar work is to guess a number and add a bit. The problem isn't that the guess is wrong — all estimates are wrong — it's that a single number hides how wrong it could be, so you can't tell whether the price survives the bad case.

Three-point estimating fixes that in about twenty minutes, and it works whether you're quoting a documentary, a marketing automation setup, or a category of work your studio has simply never sold.

Estimate three numbers, not one

For each chunk of work, write down:

• Optimistic — everything goes right, the client is decisive, no surprises.
• Most likely — what you'd genuinely expect on a normal project.
• Pessimistic — the version where the approach doesn't work first time and you restart part of it.

The pessimistic number is the one people get wrong. It is not "a bit more than likely". It's the outcome where your central assumption turns out to be false. If your pessimistic figure is 20% above your likely figure, you haven't found the real risk yet.

Then combine them:

Expected hours = (optimistic + 4 × likely + pessimistic) / 6

The weighting pulls the answer towards the likely case while still letting a fat tail move it. It's a well-known estimating formula, not a magic one, and its main value is that it forces the three conversations.

Worked example

A hypothetical agency is asked to produce something adjacent to its usual work — a format the team understands in principle but has never shipped end to end.

	Hours
Optimistic	120
Most likely	180
Pessimistic	320

Expected = (120 + 4 × 180 + 320) / 6
         = 1,160 / 6
         = 193.3  → call it 193 hours

Note what a naive average would have given you: (120 + 180 + 320) / 3 = 206.7. The weighted figure is lower, because "most likely" is genuinely more likely than the extremes. Three-point estimating isn't just padding.

At a loaded cost of $95 an hour, 193 hours costs $18,335. Priced at twice cost, that's $36,670 — call it a $37,000 quote.

Now price the risk, not the estimate

Here's the part that makes the exercise worth doing. Run the quote against all three scenarios:

Scenario	Hours	Cost	Margin on $37,000
Optimistic	120	$11,400	69.2%
Expected	193	$18,335	50.5%
Pessimistic	320	$30,400	17.8%

The bad case doesn't lose money — it makes 17.8%, which is thin but survivable. That's a project you can sign fixed price.

If the pessimistic row had come out negative, the conclusion isn't "raise the price until it isn't". It's that this work doesn't belong on a fixed price at all, and the honest move is capped time and materials or a paid discovery phase.

Sell discovery before you sell delivery

For genuinely unfamiliar work, the strongest option is to not price the whole thing yet.

Quote a short, fixed-price discovery — two weeks, a defined output, priced on its own merits. At the end you deliver a technical approach or creative direction, a tested assumption, and a properly scoped estimate for the delivery phase.

This is an easier sell than it sounds. You're offering the client a decision point rather than a leap, and the discovery fee is small next to the project. More importantly, you are no longer pricing the unknown — you're pricing two weeks of your team's time, which you can do accurately.

Two rules make it work: discovery must have a deliverable the client would value even if they walked away, and it must genuinely be able to change the delivery estimate. Discovery that always concludes "yes, as we said, $37,000" is theatre, and clients notice.

Find the analogy that isn't obvious

Unfamiliar doesn't mean unrelated. Before estimating, ask what past project this resembles in shape rather than in subject matter.

A first podcast series isn't like a video project because both involve media — it's like one because both are recurring production with a fixed weekly cadence, guest wrangling, and a long tail of edits. That's the comparison that tells you where the hours go.

Ask two questions of the analogous project: how many hours did it actually take, and which category of hours blew out? The second answer is usually revision cycles or client-side coordination, and it will be true of the new work too.

De-risk with sequencing

If one part of the project carries most of the uncertainty, do that part first, even if it isn't the natural starting point.

Front-loading the risky element means you discover the problem in week two, when you still have room to reduce scope, renegotiate or stop. Back-loading it means you find out in week nine, when 80% of the budget has been spent on the easy parts and every remaining option is bad.

What to charge for the privilege

There's a temptation to discount unfamiliar work to win it — you're learning, so it feels unfair to charge full rate. Resist it. You are carrying more risk, not less, and the client is buying the outcome, not your familiarity with it. If anything the risk buffer should be larger here than on routine work.

The exception is a deliberate investment: you want this sector, this logo, this capability. That's fine — but decide it explicitly, write down what you're spending and what you expect to get, and don't let it become the default price for the next four clients in that sector.

Do this on the next unfamiliar quote

Before you write a number down, spend twenty minutes with whoever will do the work and get three figures out of them. Then run the expected-hours formula and build the three-row margin table above.

You will either find a price you can defend, or find out in twenty minutes that the project shouldn't be fixed price — which is worth far more than the twenty minutes cost you.