Not a fixed number of hours per week – more like "Here's the project proposal, I estimate it'll take 5 weeks, here's roughly what I expect to get done each week

Not a fixed number of hours per week – more like "Here's the project proposal, I estimate it'll take 5 weeks, here's roughly what I expect to get done each week." Some weeks would be easier than I expected and I'd get ahead, some weeks would be harder and I'd end up working more. If a major event happened that would make the project take a lot longer, I'd renegotiate. > - Could you have asked to see the data first to avoid this? > - Could you have offered an initial paid discovery phase that would have given you time to go over things in more detail first and even prototype it? > - Could you have broken the project into chunks where some parts were fixed price and the really unsure parts were hourly? I could, but (1) most of my projects are quite different from each other, so the risks change, (2) the benefit seems pretty small. My clients weren't clamoring for more predictable costs – mostly they wanted transparency if a project was going to take longer than expected, as well as the ability to wrap up or cut scope if that was the case.