The case for showing the work before sending the invoice
If you have to lock clients in to keep them, the product was never the thing keeping them.
The standard agency contract front-loads the risk onto the client. You pay a deposit, you wait, and you hope. By the time you can judge the work, you've already spent enough that walking away feels worse than settling. That arrangement is good for the agency and quietly hostile to the client.
Inverting the risk
Our Try-First Guarantee is simple: we build the first working version, you use it, and if you're not convinced, you don't pay for it. No deposit held hostage, no kill fee, no negotiation. The risk of the first step sits with us, because we're the ones who claim to be good at it.
Confidence is cheap to express and expensive to back. We chose to back it.
This isn't generosity. It's a filter. It forces us to scope work we actually believe in, staff it with people who can deliver, and say no to projects where we'd be guessing. A guarantee you can afford to offer is a guarantee that has already disciplined everything upstream of it.
Why it holds
In practice, almost no one takes the refund — not because they feel obligated, but because by the time the first version exists, the relationship has already proven itself. You've watched us work. You know how we communicate, how we handle the thing we didn't anticipate, how fast we move. The guarantee gets you to that point without asking for faith up front.