| Yeah, I agree with this too. Especially when first starting out, I think it's important to only allow two of the following (and ideally only one). (a) Fixed Bid
(b) Fixed Scope
(c) Fixed Deadline You're going to continue to find that clients almost never know the full scope they want upfront, and once you've got a contract in place they'll always try to get more done without paying more. For me, the most stress-free way to do this is by doing it as an hourly rate, with a ceiling on the number of hours before you need to ask for authorization to do further work. I know some people say to price on the value to the customer, and do fixed prices per week, and so on. I personally find this hard to do because it's so difficult to accurately gauge upfront how much work a project will be. Usually I explain it to clients like this, depending on the situation: - If we make the project fixed scope, we will have to deal with renegotiating everything if they find they want just a bit more. The overhead involved in $1k-5k projects is just not worth doing the project at all at that point. Plus they'll have to develop a very specific scope ahead of time, instead of just letting me start work that can cause delays of months. - If the project is fixed bid, I'll have to make the price based on the worst case scenario rather than the median, and they'll almost certainly end up paying more than just paying me hourly. |