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I am not very experienced with this, but I would expect that you would have to do a lot of requirements gathering and design documents up front - how do you charge for these? What if you spend significant time completing these documents and have the client back out before any agreements?>
>Requirement gathering is billable work. I always charge my clients my standard hourly rate for creating a specification. After they pay for it, they own it and if they like they can hire me to perform the work or they can hire anyone else they want to.
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>FWIW, I never do fixed bid work. I always work on time and materials, but I am an experienced developer. I have a reasonable idea of how long a finite task will take. So I give my clients time estimates that they know are accurate to +/- 20%.
Thanks for the answer.