A few weeks into a website build, my client messaged me: “can we move this from Next.js to Astro?”
That isn’t a tweak. It means rebuilding the whole thing on a different framework.
Old me would’ve said “sure, no problem” and lost a week of evenings to it.
This time I wrote it up as a change order. I listed what changes, put a price on it ($300) and said how much it adds to the timeline, then sent it to the client to approve. They approved it. No awkward call, no guilt.
The lesson I keep relearning: clients aren’t trying to rip you off. They just don’t know what’s small and what’s big. If you put a price on it before you start the work, it stops being a fight.
If you’ve got a “quick tweak” story of your own, I’d love to hear it. The best ones go in the next issue of The Change Order.
Sumit
P.S. I built Scopease to make that change-order step one click for the client: https://www.scopease.xyz