Creating a new constitution is often a challenging task. When striving to produce a coherent document respected by the public, political decision-makers face numerous choices on how to recognise society’s needs, emphasise values meaningful to the state, protect rights, legitimise institutions and distribute power within the state. This translates into a choice on the structure and scope of the process and affects what resources are needed to accomplish the goal - establishing the new constitution. This paper reviews the stages of the constitution-making process and proposes a framework for evaluating direct and indirect organisational costs, including time and access to information, associated with each stage. We select twelve post-Cold War constitution-making cases that represent four contexts of constitutional change we identify, which are soft unconstitutional transition, independence and integration, post-war transition, and post-internal conflict. We assess activities undertaken throughout the process and look for context-relevant patterns, while accounting for the impact of country-specific characteristics. We conclude with a few general context-specific patterns.