For my latest contract gig, I decided to try a slightly different approach than tallying and billing hourly or guessing at a fixed-cost. We're going with a "ret

For my latest contract gig, I decided to try a slightly different approach than tallying and billing hourly or guessing at a fixed-cost. We're going with a "retainer" model which more or less makes me into an unofficial employee, but the idea is that they get X number of hours per week of my time. Deadlines and such are attempted to be met within those constraints. The upshot of this is that they have a clear and known rate of expense. If the project doesn't appear to be progressing fast enough, they could increase the hours per week they pay for, hire more help, hire someone else, or wait longer. :) The tricky part is getting into a deal like this without them trying to attach things like, "ok, you work 20 hours a week on our project - but if it's not done by the 3rd, we don't pay you." or whatever. But if you can avoid that and get them to think of you as an employee and not just a code factory, it works out.