Unclear requirements get built as a guess, then rebuilt as the thing they meant. I would rather sell the clarification.
Tags: Freelance, Clients, Estimating, Web Development, unlisted
Ambiguity feels cheap at kickoff because nobody is arguing yet. It is expensive at week six when the screens are "not what we imagined."
I put the risky sentences in the proposal in bold: who logs in, what a success looks like, what data we do not have yet. If they skip those, I do not start pixels.
Prototypes are cheaper than pride
A clickable shell with fake data surfaces arguments while they are still cheap. I would rather look unfinished than look wrong.
Twice is a pattern
If a client always discovers the product during build, I switch to weekly paid discovery until the target stops moving. Not everyone wants that. Those are not my best projects.
