Outside architecture firms quoted $300,000 to $400,000 to carry LIEF's Midtown Phoenix tower conversion through design development. That's a cost I sat with before committing.
Instead of handing the design budget to outside architects, I built the model and the code packets myself, using an in-house Revit model and the city's self-certification path, and used the architect of record only for the stamp the work legally required.
If your firm has the in-house capability to do the actual design work, paying an outside firm full price to redo it is a cost with no added value beyond the professional stamp. Isolating exactly which part of the service actually required an outside license let us pay for only that piece.
The project saved roughly $200,000 to $250,000 against outside architect budgets, and an internal agent review caught a nine-and-a-half-foot bay error and a wrong setback, worth about $250,000 in potential rework, before a human found either one.
Before you pay full price for an outside professional service, separate the part of the job that requires their license from the part your own team can already do, and only pay for the former.
This is a bet on my own team's judgment over an outside expert's default process. A bet that paid off when the internal review caught errors a purely outsourced process might never have surfaced.