You should reply to the clients when you provide the original quote with a very succinct summary/bullet list of what is being provided - SUPER SUCCINCT. and get them to sing-off on that
So if they come back with anything, and it is not boiled down into the bullet item list of features - its additional service request.
This might help them to further think about their product.
One thing that always pisses me off when getting a quote from a developer is when they say some large number of hours are required for some nebulous task.
"Setup development environment: 40 hours"
or something similar.
shouldn't your development environment be setup? or streamlined such to not require 40 hours?
so, make sure you reply to them with a super succinct understanding of what is to be delivered and this will be the go-to document for any discussion about scope.
This is good advice, and I think that's what went wrong in this case. We were told to estimate based on what we had, even though we needed to go deeper. The rationale was that we couldn't put so much time into a proposal that was so small. And on a smaller project, more risk was acceptable, which is okay, I guess, but then this is what happens.
"Setup development environment: 40 hours"
This is ridiculous, though, well UNLESS you are hiring someone to pick up work on a large existing project, in which case they may actually need the time to get all the dependencies and get it running. To be clear, our items are always in chunks of actual functionality, because this makes the most sense to ... well, everyone. And it makes it easier for them to pick and choose/set priorities/etc.
So if they come back with anything, and it is not boiled down into the bullet item list of features - its additional service request.
This might help them to further think about their product.
One thing that always pisses me off when getting a quote from a developer is when they say some large number of hours are required for some nebulous task.
"Setup development environment: 40 hours"
or something similar.
shouldn't your development environment be setup? or streamlined such to not require 40 hours?
so, make sure you reply to them with a super succinct understanding of what is to be delivered and this will be the go-to document for any discussion about scope.