The knowledge gap is the business model

When I got into tech in 2020, one thing bothered me more than anything else.

I kept watching people who knew things use that knowledge as leverage. Clients who could not tell good work from bad work were charged premium prices, talked down to in meetings, and billed separately for every small request. The less the client understood, the more it cost them.

It was not fraud. Almost none of it would fail an audit. Every line item was for something real. It was just that the price of the work had quietly detached from the cost of the work, and floated up to meet whatever the client did not know enough to question.

I promised myself I would build the opposite of that. Six years later I am still building it, and the pattern has not changed at all.

What it looks like in practice

It is rarely dramatic. It shows up as:

• A monthly subscription to a third-party tool, where a one-off script would have done the same job — and the option was never mentioned.
• A tiered price built around a volume the client will never reach, sold to a client whose actual usage is a rounding error against the tier.
• A quote for integration work from a team the client already employs.
• Jargon deployed at exactly the moment a plain-English explanation would have made the price look unreasonable.

I have specific instances of the first three, with the numbers attached, and I intend to write each of them up properly. The fourth is harder to evidence because it happens in rooms — but anyone who has sat on the buying side of a technical conversation knows the feeling of one being steered away from a question.

The tell

A few years ago we met a CEO who had been through several IT providers already. When we told her we were committed to delivering what we said we would deliver, her response was flat: “That’s what all IT companies say.”

She was right. It is what all IT companies say. Saying it is worthless. The only thing that separates the companies who mean it from the ones who do not is whether they behave differently when the client would never find out.

We delivered the first phase of her project on time, and then we were the ones pushing to start the next phase. That is the only argument I have ever found that works — not a promise, just a track record accumulating in public.

Why I publish the numbers

This is why I put real figures in what I write rather than talking in generalities. AED 55,000 against AED 7,700. A $1,000-a-month quote against about three cents a page. $28.36 in total spend where the floor quote was $12,000 a year.

Publishing those does two things. It gives someone on the buying side a reference point they did not have, which is the whole objective. And it puts me on the hook — if I ever quote a number that does not survive the same scrutiny I am applying to other people’s numbers, it is on a public page with my name at the top.

That second part is the useful discipline. It is easy to be transparent in the abstract. It is harder when your own margin is the thing being made legible.

What I am not arguing

I am not arguing that everything should be cheap, or that specialist firms are parasites. Some of the most valuable money my clients spend goes to outside specialists, and the AED 55,000 quote I turned down was a perfectly fair price for a company that did not have my team.

Expertise is worth paying for. Risk transfer is worth paying for. Being able to call someone at 11pm when a system is down is very much worth paying for.

What I am arguing is narrower: the client should be able to see which of those they are buying. When the invoice says “AI document processing” and the client has no way to know whether that is a genuinely hard problem or a weekend of configuration, the price stops being a price and becomes a test of how much they can be charged.

The uncomfortable part

Transparency costs money. Every time I tell a client that the thing they asked for can be done for a fraction of what they expected, I am reducing an invoice I could have sent.

I have made peace with that, mostly because the alternative is a business built on clients not finding out — and clients do find out, eventually, usually right before they leave.

But I want to be honest that it is a trade rather than a costless virtue. The version of my company that charged what the market tolerated would have made more money in the short run. What it would not have is a set of clients who send me work without asking for a quote first.

That trade has worked out. It might not have. It is still the one I would make again.