Two weeks from launch
Nina bid $12,000 for the website: 8 pages, 80 hours. She’s 142 hours in on a 14-page site, and this morning Derek approved another section with the Slack message she’d been dreading: We can figure out the billing later, let’s just ship.
She drafted a walk-away email. Didn’t send it.
Derek hadn’t said what he was thinking either. He was out of political capital with his CFO — every scope item he’d approved over the last month, he’d approved without a change order. May 1 couldn’t slip: trade show, Q2 campaign, no backup plan. And he was starting to see, in a way he didn’t know how to say, that he’d been the problem.
Both of them wanted the project to ship. Both wanted the relationship to survive. Neither had said so.
What each of them worked through privately
Nina’s list, written down and trimmed back: $8,000 on top of the original fee, paid on launch day (not 60 days later), no new features, a clear list of what’s shipping May 1, and an answer about what happens if Derek won’t sign. If he won’t, she walks — with a $4,000 kill fee for the extra work already done.
Derek’s side came out harder than he’d expected. She’s right that the scope has grown. I owe her a better answer than “figure it out later.” $6,000 he can approve without much argument; $8,000 needs a formal change order his CFO will actually sign. He’s ready to pay on launch instead of 60 days, freeze scope immediately, apologize for the Slack message, and commit in writing to Phase Two work at a specific budget.
What Mediator surfaced
The advanced case-study section comes out of the May 1 launch. A scope-change addendum of $6,500 covers the extra work already done, payable the day the site ships. A separate Phase Two contract for the case-study section — $4,000–$7,000 — gets negotiated in good faith by May 15, provided the May 1 launch lands clean.
The case-study section stops being a May 1 problem. It’s the work that broke scope in the first place — keeping it in the launch forces Nina to absorb it under deadline pressure and forces Derek to either pay rush fees or fight his CFO. Phase Two gives Nina a separate paycheck for it and gives Derek a separate document his CFO will sign.
Once that’s out of the launch, the fee math gets simple. Nina asked for $8,000. Derek offered $6,000. Mediator landed at $6,500, with Nina acknowledging $2,000 of the overage was hers — the interactive modules she underbid.
The piece of the addendum that matters most to Nina isn’t the number. It’s payment on launch, not 60 days. Her real fear wasn’t that Derek would refuse to pay. It was the familiar freelancer IOU: ship now, invoice later, chase for three months with new conditions attached. “Figure it out later” becoming a calendar reminder she resents. A line in the addendum makes it a date on the calendar instead.
The walk-away email didn’t go out.
The agreement above was generated by the live Mediator.ai engine from Nina's and Derek's private statements. See them here: Nina's · Derek's