alt Hacker NewsAgencies regularly charge $50k+ (on the low end) for what amounts to hours and hours of customizing a Shopify template. I was pulled into a $150k rebrand and Webflow project where the latter accounted for 40% of the budget. It was a splashy home page that violated every rule of good page design (scroll jacking, progress bars, heavy animations) and 3 inner page templates that was essentially a set of the same blocks ordered differently (thanks Boostrap!!).
I was ultimately surprised how much time actually went into that Webflow project. Like OP mentioned (in the article) clients never make time to participate or give early feedback. Most of the time they don’t even know how being actively involved in the process will save them money. Is it the service providers job to educate them?
TLDR; like the article says. Sometimes you just have to ask.
On the flip side I’ve seen many projects go way over budget when a client is actively involved and introduces scope creep that turns into launch blockers. You learn quick to have strong contracts if doing fixed price bids.
Problem seems to be clients don’t know what they want early on and when they start to see progress they understand more what they were actually expecting. Obviously you’d try to get this out of them during project planning.