He Asked for the Drawings. We Gave Him the Tank Sizes and Stopped There.

A man rang me about a building he is putting up outside the city. He had a layout drawn by somebody, a flow figure he was not confident in, and a question that sounded simple: how big do the tanks have to be. I gave him the volumes on the call. Then I took him through the order of the chambers and why each one is there at all. Twenty minutes, give or take. He thanked me, and then he asked me to send drawings his contractor could build from. That is where I stopped, and I had to explain why — which is harder than it sounds, because the first twenty minutes had cost him nothing and he had no reason to expect the next step to be different.

We have written before about the conflict created by designing and building the same plant, and about how long a quotation should be for the size of the job. This is a third thing and I want to keep it separate from both: not what we sell, but where the line sits between what we hand over for nothing and what we charge for, and why that line moved this year. It is a commercial note more than a technical one. The only reason it belongs on a blog about sewage treatment plants is that owners keep walking into it and nobody explains it to them before they are already annoyed.

What we give away, and we are not being coy about it

Tank volumes are free. The process flow is free. If you call and ask me what order the chambers go in for a hotel, or why a dressing plant needs a different front end from an office building, you will get an answer and there will be no invoice. The price estimator is on the site and open to anyone, the design generator will produce a design brief for your own numbers, the parameters that matter by industry are listed out, and the compliance limits are written down in plain language rather than held back as something you have to pay to learn. If you ask us what to test before any of that is useful, we will tell you that too, because almost nobody has an influent result and the free advice is worth more once somebody does. A fifteen-minute call is free as well, and that is not a sales trick with a timer on it — fifteen minutes is genuinely enough to tell someone whether they have a design problem, an operating problem or a paperwork problem.

We charge for execution. We do not charge for sharing knowledge. I will go further than most of my competitors are comfortable with: we will give an unsigned concept layout away too. It will not be very detailed. It will be enough for an owner to understand what he is being asked to build, and enough to take to another supplier and ask hard questions with. We have also told readers to run our own design past an AI and argue with it, which is the same instinct. If our work only survives in the dark, it is not very good work.

Where the charging starts, and what changed

Signed and sealed construction drawings are not the same object as a concept layout, and the difference is not drawing effort. A sealed set has a professional's name and licence on it. It is the document a contractor builds from without thinking, and the document that is produced if something goes wrong afterwards. Producing one takes engineers — real days of real people, drafting, checking, structural co-ordination, a civil works package that holds water rather than one that looks right on a screen. That is labour I have to pay for whether or not the job ever comes back to us, and it is why the consultancy side is priced at all rather than folded into goodwill.

Then the seal itself got more expensive for us. We no longer have a professional mechanical engineer on staff, so a seal is now bought from outside — fifteen to twenty thousand pesos to an engineer in another province, per set, before anybody has drawn a line. That is a cost we did not carry a year ago and it lands on the smallest job exactly as heavily as the largest, which is the whole reason the free tier has to stop at the unsigned layout. An unsigned concept drawing is lawful for me to hand you and is not something a contractor can build from unsupervised. A sealed set is the opposite on both counts. The line between them is not ours, which is convenient, because it means I am not inventing a boundary to protect a fee.

The line is not document versus relationship

I used to describe this as documents being free and relationships being paid. That was wrong, and a few months of actually running it showed me why. The real boundary is my own time against my team's time.

If it is just me, I do not mind. Five minutes, ten minutes, a question on a Sunday about a foam layer on the aeration tank or a clarifier throwing solids — I will take that call and I will usually learn something from it. What I cannot absorb is sustained guidance, because once it is more than that my whole schedule goes and we have a different problem. The moment a question needs an engineer to open a model, somebody to redraw a sheet, a site visit, or someone watching a plant week after week, it has stopped being me sharing what I know and started being the company doing work. That is the point where it gets priced, and it is a much more honest line than pretending a PDF costs money and a conversation does not.

The other half of the honesty is admitting what bothers me about the free side. The same questions come round again and again, which is partly why so much of it is now written down on the site instead of being said out loud. And some owners would happily have me run their project as well as my own company. Standard scheduling, proper meetings, no random calls — that is not coldness, it is the only way the free tier survives at all.

Site attendance, and why we never advance the travel

This is an island country, and people want us at site. That costs money, and we cannot fly on our own money. So site attendance is a separate line on every engagement, zoned by how far it is and whether it needs an overnight — Metro Cebu is a road trip, the next islands out are a same-day return, and anything needing a night away is priced by the day — and travel, accommodation and ground transport are quoted, invoiced and settled in cleared funds before anything is booked. We also always offer the route where the client books and pays the travel directly. It is usually cheaper for them, there is no argument about receipts afterwards, and we are not carrying their cash. That route has been taken on a live job already, so it is not a theoretical option we mention to look flexible.

We learned the arithmetic the slow way. One out-of-island mobilisation was priced from round numbers — the sort of figure you give because it sounds about right — and once the real route was built up line by line it came out roughly eight thousand pesos underwater. Repriced, and never again from a round number. The same exercise taught us something more embarrassing: the route we had assumed needed a plane was actually a single two-hour ferry crossing. One leg, not two, and no flight at all. That is why every travel line in our documents now reads travel and never airfare. A visit the client cancels inside seventy-two hours of departure is charged at one day plus whatever travel cannot be recovered, and a design fee never quietly absorbs a site visit. If a visit is in the price, it is written as a visit.

Witnessing concrete without standing next to it

The travel problem pushed us into something that has turned out to be a better product than the retainer we originally sketched. On a retrofit of an existing tank set we offered construction supervision performed remotely: the general contractor submits photographs, video and measurements at each hold point, we run live walk-downs on a call, we witness the water-tightness test remotely, and we issue hold-point sign-offs as documents. No site attendance at all, and a one-off visit arranged separately at cost if the owner wants one.

This is a different question from who pours the concrete, which we price three ways and have written about on its own. That post is about whose crew is on the ground. This is about who witnesses what they did, and the answer can be us even when we are four hundred kilometres away. It is offered as an alternative to the turnkey civil route rather than alongside it — an owner takes one or the other, never both, or he is paying twice for the same assurance. For an island country it removes the single most expensive and least reliable part of supervising a build, which is getting a person to the site on the right morning.

The part of this that does not flatter us

Design-only work has never actually sold for us. Two engagements have been quoted properly — one a small resort plant, one a four-hundred-cubic-metre-a-day retrofit — and neither converted. Two out of two, no sales. The sample is small, and I never went back and asked either owner whether it was the price or whether the project simply died, which is its own failure of method, because that answer is the only real evidence of where the market is and I do not have it.

I have since written down what those two fees actually were, and why they sat so close together — fifty times the plant size, about one and a half times the fee. The arithmetic behind a near-flat design fee explains the free line above better than any principle of mine does: when the cost of delivering a design barely moves with the size of the plant, the only sensible place to stop giving things away is the point where other people's days start getting spent.

Set against that is a figure I find harder to argue with. On a contract worth about two and a half million pesos, we paid another consultant two hundred thousand for commissioning help. We were the buyer. So I cannot claim that nobody pays for advice in this industry, because we did, for exactly the kind of field judgement we are trying to sell, at a price that was a meaningful share of the job. The gap between those two facts is not about whether design advice is worth money. It is about whether we have found the owner who wants to buy it yet. Any price mentioned here is a price from our own documents; your site is different, and what a plant or a design set costs moves with flow, strength, the class of the receiving water and site conditions.

And one more thing I have had to accept. The DIY buyer was never really our customer. The man who takes free volumes, a free flow diagram and an unsigned layout and then builds it himself with his own contractor was never going to award us the plant, and that is fine — he was never in the market we are in. Our customers are the ones who read a design, decide these people know a thing or two, and ask us to implement it. The free tier is not a trap for the first group. It is how the second group finds out what we are like to work with.

What we do about the awkwardness of charging at all

Two things, both written into the engagement rather than offered as a gesture. A design fee is credited in full against an IWSI build contract if the build is awarded to us within twelve months. If we design it and we build it, the design cost the owner nothing in the end. And we quote the plant itself alongside the design fee, marked indicative where no bill of materials exists yet, because a design fee read on its own always looks expensive and the same number read next to a build price it is shaping looks like what it is, the same way a purchase price only means something next to the cost of running the thing every month. With no higher figure to measure against, every fee sounds large. If an owner still finds it expensive after all that, we cannot help it, and there is no hard feeling in that sentence.

What we do not do is let the free tier turn into a slow-motion free project. A written diagnosis of a plant has an end. A redesign has an end. "Help me with this for a few months" does not, and that is the version I have learned to say no to, politely, at the beginning rather than at the point where I am resentful about it. If you want to know how we think before you decide, read how we size and specify, look at what we have finished, and ask the questions worth asking before signing anything — all of that costs nothing and is meant to be used. If you would rather talk it through, our consultation page says what a session covers.

Where this does not transfer

This is our line, drawn for a company of our size in this market, and I would not expect it to be anybody else's. A firm with a licensed engineer on salary can seal a drawing at close to no marginal cost and may give away far more than we can without noticing; our boundary sits where it does partly because our seal is now bought from outside. A firm with no fabrication and no construction arm has nothing to credit a design fee against, so the credit mechanism that solves our awkwardness is unavailable to them and their fee has to stand on its own.

There are also owners for whom the credit arrangement is the wrong answer entirely. If a lender or a bid committee requires a designer with no interest in who builds it, then a fee credited against our own build contract is a conflict rather than a courtesy, and the right thing is to pay a designer who will never bid. Larger projects with formal procurement invert most of this: the scope of a design package is set by the tender document, not negotiated on a call, and a free fifteen minutes with the chairman is not something a procurement process has a slot for. And none of it says anything about reviewing a design somebody else has already finished, which is a separate piece of work with a separate structure.

The last limit is the one I am least sure about. Giving this much away works at our current volume, where my own time is the constraint and winning the build is the goal. If the consultancy ever became the business rather than the front door to the build, the line would have to move, and the first thing to go would be the part I like most — the twenty-minute phone call that starts with how big do the tanks have to be. For now, that call is open. If you have a plant that is failing a test, a building that needs a plant, or a drawing you do not trust, book a free 15-minute consultation.