The word discovery gets used for two different things, and the difference is worth being exact about, because one of them is free and one of them is not.
The growth audit. The application on our site. You answer questions about your business, and it routes you either into our nurture or straight to a conversation. It is a way in. It is free and it always will be.
Discovery. Everything between that application and a signed proposal. The discovery call. Going into your account and looking around. Research on your market and competitors. Writing the proposal itself.
None of that is charged for. As Roman puts it: that initial poking around is part of creating a proposal, and charging for it would be charging you for a quote.
We deliberately do not give this stage a public name. Naming it invites treating it as a deliverable you are owed, and then it starts to look like a free audit, which is a positioning we are moving away from on purpose.
Technical Discovery. The first phase of an actual engagement, required before any HubSpot build.
This is not the free discovery done more thoroughly. It is a different depth of work with a different output. Free discovery goes deep enough to scope and quote you honestly. Technical Discovery goes deep enough to build from, which is a much higher bar and takes considerably more time.
An agency that does full architectural discovery for free is doing one of two things. Either it is recovering the cost inside an inflated build price, so the clients who never sign are being paid for by the ones who do, or it is doing shallow work and calling it discovery.
We would rather charge for it, do it properly, and have the depth be real.
There is a version of this we are borrowing from and deliberately changing. HubSpot's own solutions architecture practice runs a technical discovery phase as unpaid pre-sale support, where an internal architect joins a rep's deal to help close it, and only above a size threshold. The prospect never buys it.
We sell it. The evidence that this is reasonable is simply that clients buy it.
The fee goes toward the full build.
That matters for how it should feel to you. It is not a standalone thing you buy, receive, and then decide about. It qualifies and commits at the same time. By the time we have presented a real solutions design, you have a document you could hand to anyone, and in practice you are unlikely to want to, because the people who wrote it understand it best.
We would rather be honest that this is the intent than pretend the phase is neutral.
We use it for exactly one thing: the free growth audit application on our site.
We do not use it for the paid phase. That is Technical Discovery, which is also what HubSpot's own solutions architecture framework calls it, so anyone certified in that framework already knows what we mean.
If you hear us say "audit" and mean something you are paying for, correct us. We got it wrong.