On the first day I started Draft, I sat down and wrote up a business plan, and somewhere in the first couple of paragraphs, alongside our declarations that we will never advertise & only send email, was a sentence that felt uncontroversial at the time: we won’t work for free. In practice, today this includes free “audits” (get our teardowns instead, which are cheap and worth it), “brain-picking” calls (get a strategy call instead), and unpaid expansions of scope.

Just as (I hope) you get paid to show up at your job every day, we get paid to work, too. And since Draft is a design consultancy, that has to be in the front of our heads at all times. Designers have a rich history of being stiffed & devalued. Draft never has. How? Because we ask to be paid for our work. Then we do the work.

Evergreen reasons

So if you’re at this page, either you’ve asked us to work for free, or you got curious and clicked a link about it. Here is your business case for why paid work makes the most amount of sense for us:

• Design can’t exist as a “free sample.” It could be argued that free samples of our work would be helpful for understanding how we’d work together, but in practice that results in a far worse outcome for you. Any “free sample” is, by definition, rooted in unfocused guessing that isn’t holistically connected to how your business really works. That makes the work worse, which hurts both our reputation and our ability to help you. Instead, we talk a lot about how to do what we do, and we’re more than happy to answer the question “how would you begin to solve this problem” when asked.
• We get results. For those of you who think we might be a risky investment, we do a lot to reduce that sense of risk outside of free work. Each of our case studies explains our thinking, with corresponding numbers to show impact. We show examples of prior work, too, in case you’re wondering how we think about design. Our books have sold thousands of copies and strongly influenced the industry. We’re happy to furnish direct contacts to our prior clients upon request.
• We already provide quite a lot for free. Go to our resource library and learn how to do this work. Get our letters every week to understand our mindset. If you’re a prospective client, we might have already mailed you our books for free. In short, you’ll get the how, but answering the what is why we run a consultancy.

You pay us, we do our job, rinse & repeat

Philosophically, we would rather work for people who understand that what we do is work, that that work should be paid for, and then act accordingly. We find it results in a cleaner dynamic for all parties.

We almost certainly leave tens of thousands of dollars on the table every year because we refuse to work for free. But people magnify the bad, and that’s not the full story. We are grateful beyond words to make enough to live simply and well, from clients who respect the integrity of our work and really want to buy design because of what it is. Because design means something. Because the kind of design we practice has an economic impact.

Asking for money in exchange for our labor is simply the right thing to do.

Keep it simple

For the record, I don’t think people deliberately ask us to work for free. I think they see how the rest of the industry operates and do what everyone else does.

Know, for the record, that I personally mulligan all requests to work for free. I send this page and move on. Some people ghost us and go with a cheap thing. Some come back later. Others blink, find the money, and pay us. If I had to pick a favorite outcome, it would be that one.

So, boundary set, you can get a teardown, book a call, or apply for consulting work. Now & always, we’d be grateful & honored to work together.

And finally, thanks for reading this, for your understanding, for your interest in our tiny business, and for doing whatever you do to make your way through the world. Maybe we’ll work together someday, but if not, that’s cool, too. The universe works out however it may, and at the end of the day we find that we are all held by each other in ways we never could have expected.

— Nick Disabato