[pdimitar]

Then I think the good criteria to apply here is: what was the goal of the project?

If it was a quick cash-grab then obviously a long and expensive rewrite is deemed unsuccessful. If you go for the long haul and want to bring real value to your customers and the rewrite helped you do that, then it was a success.

Nothing is ever cheap in IT in my opinion. I found that being very upfront with the people with the money landed me more projects than trying to lie about it and reveal the extra expenses one by one over a course of a year.

"No, that's gonna be very far from 50k euros. Be prepared to pay 300k and it's not gonna be a year. Optimisically, two, realistically, two and half to three."

It works surprisingly well with experienced businessmen. They applaud the honesty and we move directly to the next point -- what are the tradeoffs and compromises.