In my experience, honesty is your friend here :) I had a contract that we took on which inherited someone else's codebase as a starting point, but it sounded s

In my experience, honesty is your friend here :) I had a contract that we took on which inherited someone else's codebase as a starting point, but it sounded simple enough. When we realized it was getting not-so-simple we had to decide whether to go back to the client and explain that it's going to be more than we thought, or whether to just push through and go over a bit (false coder heroism...). We decided to push through. Turned out that just made things even worse and we would need even more time to fix it now. We were also busy with another big project at the same time, so we were focused more on that as well. So things dragged on. Finally, I had to have a meeting with the client where I could make something up or simply tell them the truth. I opted for the truth (that would be my dad's influence :). I was pretty scared it wouldn't work, but they accepted my apology and the plan to correct it, which did require more time and money to complete. I felt like I had dodged a bullet. We managed to sort everything out in the end, learned our lesson, and they've since recommended us to several other companies because they feel they can trust us. And it feels pretty good to have earned someone's trust that way too. Anyway, I write way too much on here... (gotta learn to edit! ;) But good luck with your project, hopefully you'll have the same luck I did!