Fighting spec creep and more – freelancers notes from 25th June 2025
Posted by Paul Silver
On 25th June, seventeen freelancers got together in the Lord Nelson Inn, Brighton, to chat all things self employment, tech and more.
It was especially nice to see Matt for the first time in ages.
Here’s some of what we talked about:
- Fighting off AI bots swamping your site and slowing it down or taking it offline
- The business side of running a startup is hassle
- Solstices
- Trying to move a company from having a server in-house to the cloud
- Living on the road and off grid
- Being happy to find a client does definitely need your services
- Stopping spec creep
- Wanting to actually give value to our clients
- Brighton Py meet up was great
- Working while ill
- Diving off Newhaven and Brighton
- Never do a favour – being stuck with old hosting due to friend’s websites
- ‘Book Yourself Solid’ by Micheal Port
- Products vs consulting work
- Moving an old PHP site to a more modern framework in a piecemeal way
- Moving from CouchDB to Maria to serve JSON quickly
- Too many people just believing in AI vs the results of their usage
- Avoiding politics
- Not running your own email server any more
- What have you listened to on a long trip? (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Dara O’Briain)
- Auto Shenanigans travel podcast – https://www.youtube.com/AutoShenanigans
- Getting paid for your work
- Motor racing (F1, FE & WEC)
Fighting spec creep
A perennial problem in freelancing, “spec creep” or “scope creep” is when you’ve started a job, e.g. building a website or designing a brochure, and the client then wants more work done than originally agreed, like extra pages being added.
There are various ways to prevent this:
Before starting
Nail down what they want before the job starts. Go through their specification or requirements and make sure there are no vague or grey areas. If there is vagueness, insist they decide what they want before starting. With some projects, this can involve several rounds of requesting more details with clients as sometimes they haven’t thought through a section that’s there in their requirements, and still don’t really want to decide when asked about it – this is especially the case where several people their end need to decide things.
After starting
This is harder: you have to push back. This can involve learning how to push back.
So, say you’re building a website and the client says “Ah, we need to add an About page” but this page wasn’t in the list of what they asked for in the first place, you have two options:
“Sure thing, that will cost £xxx more.”
“Sure thing, unfortunately I don’t have time to add that into the project for launch so it will need to go into another phase. I’ll quote you for that soon.”
(Please don’t use such a short reply! This is the summary of what you send back.)
The important thing with both of these replies is to build a link between we’re asking for more things and we’re having to pay for the things we’re asking for in the client’s mind. Because over the long term this makes your life much more straightforward. Saying you’ll add more into the project for free gives the client a strong temptation to keep adding as they expect not to pay more.
If the client doesn’t want to pay the extra but still wants the extra thing, then you need to push back. Explain that you quoted for what they wanted and by adding more, the project will take more time to do and so, you will be charging more for it. If they don’t want the extra thing they’ve requested, then it is fine, you’re happy to continue building the project as laid out originally for the price you quoted.
These conversations can feel quite awkward – especially if you’re British – but believe me, it is much, much better over the long term to get in this habit. They need to see you as a professional that respects their time, and you need to see yourself as that too.
A “contingency” can help
It is useful when quoting for projects that are fixed price (i.e. they ask you for a quote for a project and expect you to stick to it) to add a “contingency.” This is some money that you suggest they set aside for any unforeseen problems in the project. Say, 10-15% of the project fee. So, if they realise they forgot something they want once they’re seeing the project part done – which does tend to focus people’s mind on the reality of the thing they’ve asked for – then the extra time comes out of the contingency fund and it’s understood before starting that extra work will be charged, just out of that extra budget.
No extras asked for? No contingency used, so you don’t get to charge for any of it.
A contingency can also be useful if you’re going into a project that has some unknowns but the client really wants a fixed price and you’re not able to get them to accept being charged hourly/daily for your time. So, say you’ve got to use a new API that you’ve never touched before and you’re not sure how long that part will take – a contingency can give you a bit of a safety net so if it turns out the API documentation is inaccurate, you don’t burn a ton of time making things work and not get paid for it – there’s some extra funds that have been agreed in case this happens.
When asking for a contingency in this case, you need to tell a client what it is for – set their expectations so they know what to budget for.
This is normal
It is normal for clients to forget things they want in a project or for some parts not to be fully thought through. It is very difficult for people to imagine the end part of a project and everything that needs to go into it. You can help with this with having wireframes of a project – this works with some clients and not with others – or stages where they get to see and amend what they want – or a myriad of other ways. Fundamentally, you’re going to hit situations where they want more than they realised when you started.
Learning to push back politely and get them to accept that such changes are charged for is a completely normal part of business. You need to remember that if you’re nervous about telling them. It’s normal to pay more if you want more. Make your response professional but casual – it’s the most normal thing in the world that when they want more you send back a message saying how much more they’ll be charged, or whether it can be added right now. It’s not a big deal, it’s just normal.