Scope Creep Examples — Web development
A full competitor technical audit, treated as part of the retainer
The dev retainer covers bug fixes and small feature work. The client asks for a deep technical audit of a competitor's site performance and architecture.
The retainer covers a monthly hour allotment for bug fixes and small feature work on the client's own application. The client asks for a technical audit of a competitor's website — page speed, tech stack inference, how their checkout flow is architected — to inform product decisions, expecting it billed against the same retainer hours as a routine task. Reverse-engineering another site's technical approach is genuine investigative work, not a bug fix.
Clause typically implicated
Clause typically implicated
Deliverables clause→ — The retainer's hours are scoped for bug fixes and small features on the client's own application — investigating a third party's site is a different kind of deliverable.
Suggested change-order wording
Suggested change-order wording (illustrative, not legal advice)
A technical audit of a competitor's site is real investigative work — performance profiling, inferring their stack, mapping their flows — distinct from the bug-fix and feature work our retainer hours are scoped for. I can put together a proposal for a one-time technical audit as a separate deliverable, estimated at [X] hours. Want me to send pricing?
How this usually resolves
It's worth being upfront that some technical details (a competitor's backend architecture, for instance) simply aren't fully knowable from the outside — setting that expectation up front avoids delivering a report the client feels is incomplete relative to what they imagined.
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