[rurban]

That's what we effectively sometimes. We were asked by a company to work on their codebase, add some additional features. In order to give a good effort estimation, we asked to looked at this Qt C++ codebase. I went to their office and look through carefully. The code was good and we could make a good offer.

In other cases we saw bad codebases, and asked for 10x more. Which they paid. And it really was 10x more the effort, as it turned out.

"We" is not a single employee, but a contracting company. So our leverage is better, compared to a lone wolf.