The rooms
a lever in The Unicorn Factory
Every asking price in the shop comes from one written method. Two people following it on the same piece should land within about ten percent of each other. The prices are asks: where the seller opens. They are not appraisals, and nothing has sold at any of them.
A piece sold whole. The idea changes hands along with the code, the design and, where there is one, the address. Pieces marked not for sale get no price at all.
Commissions work differently. The client keeps their own idea, so there is nothing to charge for one, and the price is set by what we deliver. Those prices are in the Price Book.
Most of every price is the idea. It is scored on four things: how original it is, how well public evidence documents the problem it solves, how much design thinking sits behind it, and what a buyer would own that a funded competitor could not copy off the public page.
Originality is judged against real competitors and nothing else. Before anyone scores a piece, we find the closest products and services, free and government ones included, and check whether their features work in practice or only on the marketing page. Every competitor is cited. If one already does the core of the idea, the idea is discounted in proportion.
Two raters score each piece separately, from the same evidence, without seeing each other’s work. Their scores are averaged. More than ten points apart and a third rater comes in.
An idea is worth more when it could carry a large business. The market is what buyers of this kind already spend in a year: a cited count of buyers times what they pay for the whole job. It is not our forecast of anything. A free piece with no way to charge has no market, and its idea is priced that way.
Then the build. The raters estimate how many hours a capable senior developer, using today’s tools, would need to rebuild the piece to the state a visitor can see. That figure is scaled by condition: whether it is public and working, whether a buyer could run it without us, and which legal or licensing gates are still open. Nothing built adds nothing.
The build is never valued above what we would charge to build it new.
A piece that earns real money can be priced on its last twelve months of revenue instead, when that comes out higher. Actual revenue only. Never a projection, and never added on top of the idea and the build.
A piece can be listed before it is finished. It is priced as the finished version and marked in development, with how long delivery takes after an order. The terms of sale say plainly that it is not built yet.
Every price carries the date it was set. The prices in the shop now were set on 3 October 2026.
A price moves only for a reason: a competitor arrives or leaves, new evidence of the need turns up, what is built or cleared changes, real revenue comes in, or the method itself changes. Each change is logged with its date and its reason. An old price is never overwritten and never struck through.
These are the seller’s opening asks. Nobody independent has checked them, and they are not market prices. If you think we have it wrong, a viewing is where that conversation starts.
Method version 9, in effect from 3 October 2026. It replaced eight earlier versions written the same week.