so i've been doing commercial work for about two years now and honestly the technical side of flying is the easy part. the hard part is clients who agree to a scope and then on shoot day start asking for extra passes, different angles, 'can you just do a quick orbit of that building over there too' etc. had a real estate client last week who hired me for a standard exterior package and by the end of the morning he wanted interior walk-throughs (which i dont even do) and footage of the street and neighborhood 'just for context'.

i mostly said yes because i didn't want the awkward conversation but then i was editing for like twice as long as i budgeted. starting to think i need a much more detailed contract or at least a written scope document they sign before i show up. anyone dealt with this and figured out a good system? or do you just build extra buffer time into your quotes to account for scope creep?

yeah this is basically the job lol. what i do now is send a shot list before every booking and have them approve it in writing ? even just an email reply saying 'looks good' is enough. then on the day if they ask for something not on the list i just say 'that's not in the package but i can add it for X amount' and honestly most of the time they either say ok or they drop it. the ones who push back are usually the ones who were never going to pay fairly anyway.

took me a while to get comfortable saying it but once you frame it casually like it's just normal business practice people don't really get weird about it. the contract stuff matters too but in my experience just having that shot list conversation ahead of time filters out a lot of the chaos on shoot day.

im still pretty new to paid work but i ran into this exact thing on my third job ever and it really stressed me out. ended up just doing everything they asked and basically worked for free by the end of it. my mentor told me afterwards that scope creep is actually one of the main reasons people burn out of freelance work, not the flying or even the editing. gonna try the shot list thing you mentioned, seems simple enough.