Start where the product lives

A blank contact form is a request to wait. You describe a problem into a box, receive an automated acknowledgement, and someone reads it whenever they next open the inbox. Nothing about that sequence helps either side: the description is usually missing the two facts that determine the price, and the delay costs a day before anyone discovers which two.

The bot asks those questions directly. What is being automated, roughly how many people touch it, which system it has to write back to, whether payment is involved and in what currency, and how soon it needs to exist. Five answers is enough to place a project against the published catalogue and return a real number rather than a range.

The written brief exists for everyone the bot does not suit — a buyer on a work laptop without Telegram, or someone who would rather answer in their own time. It is not a blank box: it asks which outcome you need and which systems are involved, shows an estimate from the published prices while you answer, and accepts an email address in place of a handle. The bot is still the route we recommend, because it is a working example of what we build.

The constraint you are worried about, if you know it. "We need to notify forty thousand subscribers within a minute" or "our payment provider will not underwrite the category" is more useful than a feature list, because those are the facts that move a price. A feature list can be inferred; a constraint cannot.

The system the bot has to talk to, by name. A booking bot that writes into Google Calendar and one that writes into a practice management system with a nightly export are different builds with different prices, and the difference is invisible from the outside.

Whether a date already exists. A campaign launch, a licence deadline, a trade show. Fixed delivery windows only mean something against a date, and a project that has one should say so before the scope is agreed rather than after.

The conversation and the answers are stored so a scope can be produced from them and so the same questions are not asked twice. Which pages you read before starting is recorded alongside it, because a reader who arrived from a page about Telegram Stars is asking a different question from one who arrived from a page about clinic bookings, and knowing that makes the first reply better.

None of it is sold, shared with an advertising network, or used to contact you about anything other than the enquiry. The full account of what is collected and how long it is kept is set out in plain language rather than in a policy nobody reads.

If you would rather not start in Telegram at all, the written brief takes an email address instead of a handle and the quote comes back by email. It is a slightly slower path to the same place, and the questions about your systems still have to be answered.

For anything that maps onto the published catalogue, an exact figure and an exact delivery window, usually within the same working day. Those numbers come from the same table this whole site is generated from, so the price quoted in conversation is the price on the page, and neither can drift from the other.

For work that does not map cleanly — an unusual integration, a regulated flow, a rescue of somebody else's bot — a short call rather than a number, because quoting a figure for a system nobody has seen yet is how the five-hundred-dollar quote happens.

And occasionally, a recommendation to use something else. If the requirement is a menu, a scheduled broadcast and nothing more, a subscription flow builder does that for a fraction of the cost, and saying so is cheaper for everyone than discovering it in week three.