At Open Solutions, we tend to undertake a lot of fixed price contracts to develop web applications. In fact, clients usually insist on fixed price contracts as they want to know in advance what the bill will be.
However, fixed price contracts have big negatives for both parties:
- for the client, a fixed price contract can often limit them to their earliest ideas. Now, as a service provider, we want to be flexible and so we’re happy to chop and change as a project develops. But, this leads to:
- for the service provider, if change and revision requests are not carefully managed agreed and billed for, the service provider could very quickly end up making a loss on the contract and thus find themselves in the position of funding their clients project!
To this end, we’ve recently been reviewing various web development contracts and have found some nice inspiration for basing our own on.
- A detailed and legalistic contract can be found here: Design and Development Contract.
- https://gist.github.com/barryo/84ea265001f1afe28dfe
- Andy Clarke of Stuff & Nonsense wrote a plain language Contract Killer for web design which we like a lot. He also discusses it here
- Smashing Magazine published a useful set of resources called The Collective Legal Guide for Designers (Contract Samples).
- If your interested in some inspiration for web design and maintenance contracts, then check this one out.
Following the success of Killer Contract, Andy wrote a plain language NDAÂ (also available as a Gist).