While sorting through old files we came across our first quote from 2016 — one page, a hand-typed table, with the company name from the registration we'd just completed. We set it next to one of this year's quotes.
Quite a lot has changed. Line items grew from 4 to more than a dozen, adding testing, deployment, data migration, and a maintenance period. Prices are different. The format went from a Word table to a numbered template. Even the contact info in the footer has been replaced twice — the 2016 version still lists an email we retired long ago.
But one line hasn't changed by a single word in ten years:
Once requirements are confirmed, scope changes are quoted separately.
What This Line Is For
It doesn't promise a delivery date, state an uptime figure, or scare anyone. It says one thing: what we settle today is priced at today's rate; anything added later gets priced again.
We wrote it in 2016 because a project had scared us. Back then we were building a website, and every few days the client would drop a message on QQ: "Could you also add a message board?" "Can the banner be animated?" We were too polite to push back and said yes to everything — by the final month we were essentially working for free. Right after registering the company, the first thing we did was type this line into the quote template.
It Has Been Criticized
Some say the line is too stiff and makes us look inflexible. One client, after reading it, asked straight out whether changing a single word would cost money too. We've explained many times: changing a word doesn't count; "while you're at it, make registration a two-level approval flow" does. The line isn't drawn by the wording — it's drawn by how detailed the requirement list is on the day it's confirmed.
We learned our lesson and moved acceptance criteria up into the requirements phase, as a companion to this line. The more specific the list, the less we ever have to invoke it.
The Times It Saved Us
In 2019, halfway through the Lianyu settlement reports, the client wanted to add "stats by driver." We pointed at this line, and they decided on their own to defer it to phase two. In 2022, during a redesign, someone suddenly wanted live visitor counts — this line stopped that too. It wasn't that we didn't want to do it; changing the caching strategy at that point would have been expensive.
There have been times it didn't hold: we took on extra work without repricing and swallowed the loss ourselves. Looking back at the line on those days stings a little.
Now
The template has been through several versions, and someone suggested softening the line — something like "any adjustments will be evaluated separately." We tried one version. It read pleasantly but lost something: "quoted separately" makes it unambiguous that this isn't free, while the softer version blurs that. We changed it back.
Ten years on, we've changed tools, changed the tech stack, and grown from one office to two. What still does the real work on our quote is this plainest of sentences.
On the afternoon of October 9, we saved scans of both quotes into the same folder — the old one with "2016" in the filename, the new one with "2026." The ten years between them don't need a summary. We'll just leave them there.
