Ask HN: Solo developer, how to embrace and negotiate scope creep?
I&#x27;m building an app for a friend&#x27;s company for some extra cash.<p>TLDR: Halfway there and they&#x27;ve been asking for more and more changes to the way the app works. There&#x27;s a written scope agreement, but it&#x27;s somewhat high level, as my friend is not technical. Their demands aren&#x27;t strictly outside the scope but require a lot of redoing the same work. How do I tell them I&#x27;ll need to charge 2x or 3x the initial quote to complete the app?<p>Long version:<p>It&#x27;s a dashboard to manage client data (not a CRM). Their current system is very manual, loose and easy to break with invalid data, but flexibility is a must as each of their clients has some unique aspects.<p>With their help I identified the data structure and operations we needed to cover most use cases and automate some tasks, while keeping the flexibility. I presented him We agreed on the scope and costs. There&#x27;s a written scope agreement, but it&#x27;s somewhat high level, as my friend is not technical.<p>The (my) problems began when during demonstrations of alpha versions my friend starts asking to do some things in specific ways. That was fine up to a point, but their demands started to increasingly interfere with the foundational assumptions I made to design the data flow. Most of those demands are business logic that can be achieved with the operations the app provides (and I&#x27;ve already demonstrated it to them), and weren&#x27;t part of the initial scope.<p>I understand their desire to have more of the business logic hardcoded, and I&#x27;ve already incorporated some of the demands, but I feel they&#x27;ll keep coming, and at some point the ad-hoc code will become a mess and I&#x27;ll have to redesign it from scratch. How do I approach them to tell I&#x27;ll need to charge twice the initial quote to complete the app, or even more if they keep asking?