[w0rd-driven]

I'm no lawyer but wouldn't email communication at the very least be used as evidence, if not an "informal contract". The scope of the work had to be defined somewhere. Obviously this falls apart if this was all done via verbal communication but its always a good idea to have this in some form you can store for safe keeping. Even recorded phone conversations count.

A purposeful contract makes sense in every situation but if you have clear documentation without one, you should be pretty well off when a problem arises.

The notion of hourly work is something I try to divorce from my thoughts. Yes I do base what I do on some hourly metric but the complexity has to matter to some degree. Generally more complex = way more hours but that's not always the case. Most of my problems in this area come from uncovering a hornets nest when something just seems simple enough on the surface.

I like to think of it this way. Office is still $x per seat. I may have figured out 98% of a domain but I should charge the last customer the work it took to get to that point from customer #1. I may have to do much less work if I've done my job right but there's no telling exactly what of that they'll want to unravel in the process. Unlike Office I don't have a bankroll for r&d I can charge a premium for to recoup my losses over clients. Clients need to assume that just because they want what someone else has its never what they paid - the hours it takes to just tweak it for them.