When your brand quote doubles halfway through

There's a documented case of a founder who hired a brand and site redesign expecting something that would take a few weeks. It ended up taking seven months and costing more than seven times the initial budget. When he asked about the timeline, the designer's answer was literally "how long is a piece of string?", a common British idiom in design and agency circles. It's used rhetorically to say an answer is impossible to give because it depends entirely on unknown variables, or on the client's own shifting wishes.

It's not a one-off case. The pattern repeats with variations: a reasonable initial quote, and halfway through, requests for extra payment for things the client assumed were included. Sometimes it's "minor adjustments" that turn out to be a full redesign billed separately. Sometimes it's a switch to hourly billing after the project already started under a fixed price.

The underlying problem is almost never that the project gets complicated. Real projects get complicated, that's normal. The problem is when that complication is never discussed upfront: what happens if the scope changes, who decides whether something is an "adjustment" or a "new project", and what each scenario costs before it comes up.

Before signing a brand quote, it's worth asking for the scope to be spelled out in writing: not just what gets delivered, but what happens if the process needs more rounds than planned, and how that gets billed. An agency that resists putting that in writing is leaving the door open to the same surprise that founder went through.