This sounds like every accidentally toxic (maybe sometimes no accident) contractor relationship I've ever seen. The initial energetic kick off, the slow decli

This sounds like every accidentally toxic (maybe sometimes no accident) contractor relationship I've ever seen. The initial energetic kick off, the slow decline into unimportant details, lowered enthusiasm, and unreturned messages, and so on. Often driven by lack of clear scope from the client & a vendor whose enthusiasm far outpaces even the loose scope restrictions provided. In this case, sure, the author bears some responsibility but from their account they seem to have gone in with a relatively clear scope. The thing that really makes it all not smell quite right is that the pace of work didn't even get significantly better when the author agreed to a retainer contract, only when they cancelled it with a month still prepaid for work to be done. So the vendor, perhaps not completely or intentionally predatory in it's practices, moves quickly to get the client out the door without making too much of a fuss. This is the unfortunate state things can arrive at even with the best of intentions, so hopefully that's all it was here too, but it still doesn't reflect well on then vendor. A disciplined contractor will work a bit more to keep a client on point and aware of progress towards goals vs. budget remaining, estimates for going out of scope, etc.