Agencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks Boostrap!!).

I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time they don’t even know how being actively involved in the process will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate them?

TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.

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dawnerd 3 days ago | parent [-]

On the flip side I’ve seen many projects go way over budget when a client is actively involved and introduces scope creep that turns into launch blockers. You learn quick to have strong contracts if doing fixed price bids.

Problem seems to be clients don’t know what they want early on and when they start to see progress they understand more what they were actually expecting. Obviously you’d try to get this out of them during project planning.

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mraza007 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is so true, scope creep is real when the client actively gets involved

And when that happens it’s better to move the contract to hourly rather having it fixed price

But you are also right about having a strong contract

	▲	phillsav 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		“Scope creep is real when the client gets actively involved” Or when there are multiple stakeholders involved. It’s a never ending stream of making the logo bigger, then reducing the size.

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rasmus-kirk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel like this is where LLM's/agents could actually help a lot. I don't like all the hype, and think that long-term projects would be better off without heavily written LLM code in any form, but stitching together stuff for a client seems like the perfect use-case, as long as they understand it's not the final product.