Pricing
Three pricing options
A fixed contractor fee, cost-plus, or a price per square foot — you choose, and Sasa will walk through which one fits your project.
What you’re choosing between
What a proposal actually contains
Every proposal here begins as a budget spreadsheet — roughly forty line items, itemized by trade: surveying, foundation, block, trusses, electrical, plumbing, kitchen, down to the dumpster. Our contracting fee is its own line. Before you sign anything, you see what each trade costs and what we cost. That spreadsheet is then attached to the contract as an exhibit — the numbers you agreed to are the numbers the project is held to. How the money moves once construction starts — invoices, receipts, draws — is covered on the process page.
Where estimates go wrong
Most clients take the fixed fee, because it removes any incentive to inflate costs. What it cannot do is protect you from a builder who priced the job wrong to begin with.
Most cost overruns on coastal builds are not surprises. They are risks that could have been priced before anyone broke ground — some sitting unaddressed in the drawings, some requiring a question nobody thought to ask. A soil test nobody required found the ground needed piles at fifty-five feet. A beam sized for a span that changed when a wall came out of the plan. Flood elevation that pushes the whole structure up six feet and takes the stair, the utilities, and the driveway with it.
Each of these is avoidable before anyone breaks ground — but only if someone is reading the structural package carefully and asking the right questions before it’s finalized, rather than counting square footage. That reading happens before Nikic gives you a number. The drawings get checked against the site, and the things that will drive cost get named while you can still do something about them.
The other half is knowing what that work actually takes. Sasa spent 12 years doing most of these trades himself — framing, concrete and block, drywall, tile, pavers — before he ever priced them for anyone. A detail that looks simple on a drawing and takes three days in the field is not a line item to him. It’s a job he has done.
A fixed fee protects you from a builder who benefits when the project gets more expensive. Reading the drawings and knowing the trades protects you from finding out what the project actually costs in month seven.
What we don’t publish
There is no honest price per square foot
You will find builders who publish one. On coastal lots the number is close to meaningless, and here is why: two houses of identical size on the same street can differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars before a single finish is chosen — because one needs piles to fifty-five feet and the other does not, or one sits in a flood zone that requires an extra six feet of elevation.
A published square-foot number either has to be high enough to cover the worst case, which makes it useless as a comparison, or low enough to look attractive, which makes it a number nobody intends to honour.
Send the lot and the plans, or just the lot. Sasa will tell you what drives the cost on that specific site before you have spent anything.
Want a number for your project?
Send the lot, the plans if you have them, and roughly where you are in the process. Sasa will tell you what the build involves and what drives its cost.