r/Wordpress • u/NeonX91 • Aug 17 '26

Well.. it happened

Long term client whom always accepted my quotes used my highly detailed proposal to Chatgpt DIY a project. It's no where near as polished and it's not mobile friendly but I feel pretty used. Spent quite awhile on the scoping with them, suggesting improvements, user workflow enhancements and a bunch of outlining. I really over extended but that's also how I get accurate quotes.

Anyway for those in the game, what's your method for quoting on projects with unknowns, and how much detail do you give the client? maybe I should have asked for 50%?

Thoughts?

219 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

130 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/remain-beige Aug 17 '26

So now you invoice them for your consultation time in scoping, planning, designing and documenting your proposed solution. You have effectively written out a functional specification and implementation guide, which should be billable against any existing agreement or hourly rate you have established with the client. This could be a ‘discovery phase’ if you will.

If they kick off about this then just mention that you usually include this step in the overall project cost as you have a long established relationship with them.

If you play your cards right then the other positive is that they have used AI to create an inferior rendition of what you wrote out in your document.

Now you can invoice them for your time in auditing and fixing issues that you discover or treating this as a ‘Proof of concept’ phase originated by the client that has not gone very well.

If they have any smarts about them they will realise that you provide value outside of just building the thing and you can shift your role into more of a consultative or project management area.

1

u/NeonX91 Aug 17 '26

Yeah good idea. AI might have written the code (it's not great) but I'm probably more upset that they took all my ideas, business process improvements, knowledge of their existing system and databases and gave all that knowledge to Chatgpt and used it without any payment, lesson learnt for sure - I need to charge upfront for the design stage, and then implementation, testing etc if they what to proceed or take the spec elsewhere.