Frequently Asked Questions

Projects are scoped and priced individually, after a short scoping memo that we produce before any work is billed. Ongoing work runs on a monthly retainer agreed up front. For public agencies, we check your purchasing thresholds before we quote.

Four ways. Directly, as a scoped project, on time and materials, or on a monthly retainer. Through a bid or RFQ, where we respond to your solicitation. As a subcontractor to a private prime. Or through a university partner, where the university leads the award and we serve as its subcontractor — useful when you already have a relationship with a university or can contract with one more easily than with a new firm.

Yes, without sending it anywhere. For information that cannot leave your control, we run open-weight language models on local hardware rather than an outside service. Before any tool touches your data, we tell you which one it is and where it runs, and nothing produced by a model reaches you unchecked.

No, by design. We build on open-source tools wherever the work allows and deliver in open formats — CSV, GeoPackage, GeoJSON, Parquet, plain-text code — that still open cleanly in ArcGIS, Excel, Stata and Power BI. If a project genuinely needs a licensed data source, we tell you up front and pass it through at cost.

Agreed at contract time, before work starts. Our default is a permissive open-source license on reusable components and assignment or licensing of project-specific code to you. Your data stays yours.

That is the normal starting point. Describe what you have, what you need to know and the deadline. Scoping the question properly is the first thing we do on every engagement, and it is short.

Surveys ask what people say they would do. Where the question allows it, we measure what they actually do — incentivized choices with something real behind them, and discrete-choice designs built to identify the trade-offs you care about. When a survey is the only option, we say so and quantify what that costs you in confidence.

We are a small team on purpose, and we say no to work that needs scale we do not have. When a project needs more hands, faculty, students or facilities, we bring in a university partner or a prime rather than stretching. You always get the senior people on the work.