[Delumine]

The website is nice, but not $46k nice, the author needed to grow a spine. Just because you're a small client, doesn't mean you're not a client at all. This isn't charity work, but a paid service.

It's disrespectful to not only be placed on the backburner, but to be delayed months, and then have your budget inflated. Who knows how many lost potential conversions he missed out on because potential clients were turned off by the original page.

Name and shame.

[presidentender]

"the author needed to grow a spine" cuts to my soul.

I was the technical cofounder of a startup. We spent a similar amount of money on a similar agency, on advisors to tell our designer he was doing a good job, and on content writers who were friends of my business founder. I was gentle in my contrary feedback.

On the engineering side, I let an early hire (a friend of mine) refactor our codebase to future-proof it against our inevitable scale. When I tried to call a meeting and redirect, another senior engineer expressed that he "liked" the new domain-driven approach, and that was that. I should have said "no."

Ultimately we shut down; my cofounder left the company and I didn't do anything that fixed it. The business didn't make sense in retrospect. I still feel a lot of guilt for lighting the VC money on fire.

The author should have grown a spine. I should grow a spine.

[0x008]

It is totally fine to be placed on the backburner -- but then you should get backburner hourly rates and not pay the same as the big clients.

[Delumine]

I disagree, it's about scale. Yes, for a big agency you might be a "small-fry", but for the client, it's their entire dreams and livelihood entrusted into someone they're paying.

It if was a small-scale, free open-source project.. yes. But once you exchange money for services, there should be a different level of attention.