I recently contracted Deerwalk, based in Lexington, MA (http://www.deerwalk.com) after a series of recommendations from friends and mentors. They were to help me develop an initial concept through wire framing and then converge on a detailed specification for development. Unfortunately shortly thereafter my market research had determined that the concept would not be viable so I asked Deerwalk to stop work and let me focus on my next concept. After another 2 months of market research I was ready to re-engage with them and in fact asked them for initial estimates to build a prototype. They confirmed that I still had $2000 in consulting and were ready to hear my new direction. This was after a week of no response from them due to vacation issues on their end.

Consulting with my advisors they recommended I adopt the lean startup method instead of building anything at this point so I re-engaged with Deerwalk and asked for my money back. Keep in mind at this point Deerwalk had $2000 in their accounts over the last 2 months. I had then discussed with them refunding the ENTIRE amount for which they agreed. Ironically enough I felt good that they were saying the right things.. we are here to help and when you are ready we will be ready to work with you again and their new CTO even offered to stay in touch. Wow!

A few days later I got a call from their sales representative and he said he was mistaken in promising me a full refund and that they would have to charge me for time that was spent on the project. I agreed that they had spent time on wire framing and had no problem paying for it.

Well it turns out that when I got the refund they had also charged me for doing research on whether they would be capable (in terms of domain expertise) of implementing my new concept with no evidence or documentation other than an excel spreadsheet showing me the itemized list of charges.

In fact I have yet to receive a detailed report of their findings or analysis.

So at the end of the day they refunded me $1200 and I believe I owed them no more than $200:

$2000 Deposit
-$200 Wireframing
-$600 (Research?)
——-
$1200 Refund

Deerwalk subtracted an additional $600 which I never agreed or authorized for them to do. When I asked about the research they were going to send me their report and as of today I have not received any reports. My recommendation would be to look elsewhere.