[gregjor]

I understand that hourly is sometimes the only way to charge. Customers who have open-ended sporadic tasks, for example. I have a couple of those myself.

Hourly billing doesn’t prevent scope creep in my experience. Hourly billing often comes with an estimate, and the two sides may understand that estimate in different ways. Hourly no fixed fee can go wrong because of scope creep from the customer or poor estimating and wrong turns by the developer, or both. The scale of the problem becomes evident at the end of the schedule because it accumulates little by little. Then both parties blame each other.

I don’t take on projects if the customer can’t or won’t do the necessary requirements gathering and planning in advance and pay for my time. A customer who won’t do that is almost certainly going to have bigger problems down the road. I haven’t actually run into this problem a lot in 15+ years of freelancing, maybe once or twice.