Quote:
Originally Posted by borked
I see someone mentioned above that this situation is amateurish, but hey, they're just getting into adult, and believe me I think this is the best situation for adult (my clients anyway) - whether it's a $50 script or $10k project, everything is up front. If I don't work on your stuff, you see I'm not working on your stuff, and you aren't paying for me to not work on your stuff.
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Your situation is definitely not amateur at all, hope I didn't offend you as you are certainly handling things very professionally.
In my experience doing freelance work in the mainstream (mostly for larger projects) I usually ask for an RFP up front. Then I'll meet with the client and help them flesh out their RFP and answer any questions I may have in order to put together a proper proposal. The proposal I return is a final price. It includes the upfront cost of using my base framework I've developed over the 10 years, an estimated amount of client to developer contact time (billed at a much lower rate and I never charge for overages on communication), a break down of the core functionality and each piece of functionality to be included on the site with hourly breakdowns for each. This allows the client to adjust their final product by dropping functionality, adding functionality, or changing the way something works in order to bring costs down, etc...
This is the final price and I'm up front with the client letting them know that any additional changes to the site during the development will be put in as a change order and billed as an additional line item. I also let them know that changing functionality will most likely effect the timeline for the project as well. Of course I give them the whole "some things may see easy conceptually but be very complex programmatically while the opposite may also be true" drill.
I've found this to be the easiest way to work on projects with clients while protecting myself from massive scope creep. You know as well as I do how fast people can change their minds about the way something looks or works :P If it's a quick change obviously I'll throw it in at no additional cost to keep the client happy and billing 15 min worth of work is a bit ridiculous.
What I was referring to as amateur are the developers saying, "I can do that in 2 weeks" or "I'll do that for $4,500" or "I'll work on that at $X / hr until it's done".
Using an RFP method also allows non developer clients to pick a developer or development company more carefully. While developer A may take twice as long as developer B, he may charge half as much because he is less experienced. The cost is the same but a client should be wary of going with developer A as the final product will most likely be less finished and more prone to bugs. While it still takes some knowledge in development even using an RFP it definitely helps cut down on a lot of the unknowns and facilitates a better decision in the end.