Why a development agency can't give you a price on the first call
It isn't obstruction. It's the direct consequence of how the estimate is produced — and it's fixable.
Ask a development shop what your project costs and you will get some version of: we need to understand your requirements first. Six meetings later a range arrives. If you have been through this you probably assumed it was a negotiating tactic. It mostly isn't.
Here is what is actually happening. The estimate is assembled by asking individual engineers how long each piece will take, padding each answer, summing the padded numbers, and adding a contingency on top of the sum. Engineers are not available on demand, so the process takes weeks. Every engineer pads because being wrong low is punished and being wrong high is not. The result is not a price, it is a defensive document, and its width — $40k to $90k — is an honest expression of how little anyone knows at that point.
The scoping period exists to reduce that uncertainty. That is a real function. The problem is who pays for it: you do, in calendar time, before you have any information you could use to decide whether the project is worth doing.
There is a different way to structure the same decision, and it starts by noticing that most business applications are not novel. A recurring inspection business, a guard-tour business and a permit-tracking business look almost nothing alike from the outside and are nearly the same application underneath — records, roles, statuses, attachments, a document generated at the end. Once you have priced that shape enough times, effort classification is fast, and effort classification is most of what an estimate is.
So the question stops being 'how long will this take our team' and becomes 'what are the pieces, and which tier is each one.' That is a question you can answer live, on a call, with the owner in the room correcting you in real time — which also happens to produce a far more accurate scope than a written requirements document, because the person who knows how the business works is present while it is being written.
The reason more shops do not do this is not that it is impossible. It is that a specific number on call one is a commitment, and a range in week four is not.