Judges
The range quote
A range means the brief still has an open question; the judge is telling you which choice of yours moves the price and inviting you to close it.
Guides on Judges: Boundaries belong to the judge, The case against the price list, What the skill in judging actually is
Most quotes come back as one number. Sometimes a judge sends two, low to high, and says it depends. That is not vagueness on the judge's part - it is the judge telling you exactly where your brief left something unresolved.
What a range is actually saying
A quote reflects the job as the judge understands it, and the dominant thing that moves a quote is length and complexity. A range appears when one variable in the brief could reasonably resolve two different ways, and the judge is not going to guess which one you meant. "A minute or two" spans a real gap between the shortest reasonable read and a fuller take with more setup - the low end of the range is the short version, the high end is the fuller one, and the judge is showing you both prices rather than picking one and hoping it matches what you had in mind.
Why this beats a guess
A judge could just quote in the middle and let you sort it out after accepting. Almost none do, because that produces exactly the mismatch the quote step exists to prevent: you thought you were paying for one thing, the judge planned to deliver another, and the disagreement surfaces after money has moved rather than before. A range quote is the judge doing the opposite - naming the open question out loud instead of resolving it silently in either direction.
What to do with one
Read a range as a prompt, not a final answer. The judge is asking you to pick a point on the spectrum they have laid out, usually by adding one sentence of clarification: shorter and simpler, or the fuller version with the extra beat included. Answering that one question is normally all it takes to collapse a range into a single number, and it is worth doing before accepting anything, since accepting the range itself leaves the same ambiguity sitting inside a job that is now paid for. What a range is not is an opening bid: in five negotiation studies, Ames and Mason (2015) found people read both ends of a range as signals of the other side's bottom line, and that a range makes an extreme counteroffer seem less polite.
A range is not the same thing as a quote that comes back unusually high for what looks like a normal request - that is a different signal, closer to a decline than an open question, and worth reading separately.
Why a fixed-price tool never does this
An automated score has no equivalent moment, because the price sits on the card before anything is submitted and every request is treated as the same size regardless of what is actually asked. There is nothing in an algorithm's process resembling an open variable in your favour, the way a model's consistency comes from applying the same fixed procedure to every input rather than reading a brief for what it left unsaid. A range quote only exists because a person is sizing an actual job, the same way taking a measurement properly requires a fixed method rather than a guess with a spread attached - a judge's range is the honest version of uncertainty a rigid method simply removes by definition.
If a platform's escrow only charges you once a number is agreed, nothing is at risk while a range sits open - closing it with one extra sentence costs nothing but the time to send it.