[runlaszlorun]

Personally, I’ve never seen one go well though all of the projects have been relatively complex with no repeatability.

The vendor ends up losing money and the client gets a deal on paper but not in reality when you realize the corners that were cut to shove a product at the door.

You could generally go back and look at the emails on the project and see the exact point in time (often about 2/3 in) were the vendor realized they were losing money and started cutting whatever possible to not lose their shirt on the project.

I suppose that if projects were relatively straightforward like “we’re building you a wordpress site with X number of templates” one may have a chance at estimating upfront- but I’ve never worked on projects that predictability.