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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing!

>All the variations of the logo and design mocks are clearly overkill for a $15k project. The design team had time to fill and wanted to provide lots of options for you to pick from, as they typically would on a larger project. Those variations are an expectation for $100k clients, and you got the $100k customer treatment, but unfortunately not at a discount.

Oh, huh.

I was thinking about this as I did the writeup. It didn't feel at the time that they were spending excessive time on the logo variations, but I went back to the notes I took on our first call and realized how out of line all that early work now feels relative to their 30-40 hour initial estimate of the rebrand.

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It wasn’t scope creep it was a scam. Shady contractors in every industry pull stuff like this.

They didn’t deliver what you actually contracted for until you put your foot down because that was the hook — they couldn’t keep taking your money if they gave you what you wanted.

For anyone else reading this the best move would be to shut it down as soon as a single minute has been billed for out of contract work: “Hey this is not what I contracted & I won't be paying for any out of scope work.”

Absolutely this and you can take them to small claims court for breach of contract.

Here's the thing I don't get. Did you not have some guarantee of completed work? When they quoted you the $7k, I could see building timeline flexibility into that quote, but I have a hard time imagining building so much flex into the contract in terms of budget that they can hold your work hostage to where you sign the retainer contract. It seems like you should have had some sort of legal recourse to hold them accountable to delivering the promised work in a reasonable time frame before you went the retainer route and found yourself on the hook for an extra $40k. Was there not?

Also, I was surprised by how much you let Isaac get away with. He admitted he badly mismanaged the project, and made decisions that lead to that mismanagement with out consulting you. He badly blew his estimates for you, and was pretty clear that it was his fault. I would have pushed him to eat much more of the losses than he did.

What's 7k? One week of work + client comms ?

You can't really imagine anything being completed and deployed in that time.

It was a death trap to begin with. They're experience should have flagged this.

But both are equally at fault. This is what happens when clients have the lowest bidder mentality.

"the cheapest price is always the best option because it's the cheapest."

> This is what happens when clients have the lowest bidder mentality.

Your conclusion is completely at odds with this quote from the article:

> WebAgency quoted the highest rate of anyone I interviewed, but their portfolio best matched the style I wanted.

Yeah, it's more of a "highest bidder mentality". That they don't have any experience with hourly billing should have been a massive red flag as that means they need to be very conscious in how they approach the project. That they used this simply as an excuse to deprioritize the project is what caused the problems.

The agency I worked for used to offer a "special" for a brochure site. Basically it was a "website-in-a-day" deal. Customer comes to the agency in the morning, meets with designer and manager, and they agree a design (preliminary work has already been done on a logo). Customer goes for lunch, and the design is handed to two devs. Around 4PM the customer gets sight of what the devs have done, and goes home. The devs work on until say 8PM, and probably put in a couple of hours the next day.

Of course, there was then snagging; it wasn't really a one-day job. The whole deal was pretty inexpensive. We used Drupal with a custom theme.

I don't know whether we made money on these projects, but we did end up with a string of long-term customers.

Couple of questions:

1) Did you pay everything up front or was it a 50% up front and 50% on delivery basis? 2) Did you manage any deliverables on a google sheet (dates, owner etc) or something similar?

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