I finally got burned by a fixed-price contract in March

I took on a website build for $2500 flat rate with three rounds of revisions written in. The client ended up sending 12 rounds of changes over 2 months, each time saying "just one more thing." I spent around 80 hours on it when I budgeted for 40. The project cost me about $31 an hour after all was said and done. Now I charge hourly past a set scope. Has anyone else had a client turn a flat fee into a nightmare like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

anthony_jackson3118d ago

@david_palmer nailed it on scope language. What worked for me was switching to a "phased flat fee" where each revision round was a separate flat fee with its own cap, not a bucket they could keep reaching into.

david_palmer18d ago

... and here's the thing nobody talks about with fixed price contracts. Your scope language matters way more than the price itself. I've seen guys write "revisions" without defining what a revision actually is. One round of changes could mean three tweaks to the homepage, not a full content rewrite across every page and three new features. You gotta spell out what a "revision round" covers and what counts as a new request that triggers a new scope. Otherwise the client will keep testing those boundaries all day long. Your mileage may vary but I learned that lesson the hard way on a landscaping website I did for a buddy's uncle.

angelamurphy18d ago

God, that bit about "revisions" is too real. I had a client once who thought "one round of revisions" meant we'd just keep going until they felt like stopping. Like, we finished a whole site redesign and they said they'd only used up half their round. @david_palmer knows what I'm talking about, right?