Start with the boxes, not the doors
The question is whether the cabinet carcasses are sound. Cabinet boxes in most Austin homes are solidly built, and the only thing dating the kitchen is the color and sheen. If the boxes are square, the drawers run, and there is no water damage at the sink base, refinishing keeps everything that works and changes everything you dislike.
If the layout is wrong, the boxes are failing, or you want different storage, paint will not fix that. A good painter tells you so rather than taking the job.
What refinishing actually costs you
Substantially less than replacing, when the boxes are sound. Refinishing keeps your layout, your storage, and your countertops, and it takes about a week instead of a month. You also keep your kitchen partly in service throughout, which a replacement does not allow.
Cost follows door and drawer count, what the cabinets are made of, and whether you want the grain filled. A small galley kitchen with twenty doors is a different job from a large kitchen with an island, a butler pantry, and forty-plus openings.
Why cabinets need a different process from walls
A kitchen gets touched more than any other room in the house. Doors slam, fingernails catch the edge of a rail, cleaner gets sprayed on a stile and wiped off twenty times a month. A wall coating cannot survive that.
Doors and drawer fronts come off, get numbered, and are sprayed horizontally so the coating lays down flat. Nothing sags, nothing runs, and no brush ever touches a visible face. Boxes and face frames are sprayed in place with containment and extraction.
Years of cooking grease comes off first. Then every surface is scuff sanded and primed with a bonding primer chosen for what your cabinets are actually made of, whether that is oak, maple, thermofoil, or a factory-finished slab.
The grain question
Open-grain oak will read as oak through paint unless the grain is filled. Filling adds labor and cost. Some homeowners want that texture, some want a slab-smooth factory look, and there is no right answer.
Insist on a sprayed sample of your color and sheen, in both grain-filled and unfilled, before anything is committed. You are choosing something you will look at every day, and a sample panel costs a painter an hour.