The black box and the glass box.
Here is one small problem on one fictional shop, fixed twice. On the left it is handed to someone and comes back as a result. On the right it happens in the open, where you can read the check, the change and the number it moved. Step through both at once.
One check, two ways to close it.
Atelier Flora is missing the small machine-readable card that states who she is and what she does. It is a real check, it is failing on her fictional site, and it is the kind of thing anyone would happily pay a specialist to sort out.
The two columns below run the same week. Nothing in the left one is a caricature: work genuinely gets done there, and the result may well be good. What the left column cannot give her is the ability to check.
Handed over
You describe it and wait.
You describe the problem
You explain what you think is wrong, in your own words, and it is taken away. From here on, everything you know about it is what you are told.
Done in the open
You read it, change it, and check.
The check names it
Not your description of the problem — the problem, named by the same check that found it, in the words the report uses.
Put your own number in.
We are not going to tell you what an agency costs — we do not know what you pay, and inventing a figure to argue against would be the same trick as an unexplained invoice. So the number is yours. Set it to what you pay, or what you were last quoted.
The comparison is not quite fair, and it is worth saying so: an agency does work you would otherwise do yourself, and Limen does not. What Limen replaces is not the work — it is the not knowing.
Open the box on your own site.
The same checks, the same plain fixes, the same re-check — on your address, with your numbers, about a minute from now.
Free to look. No card, no call.