Scope creep
The project quietly growing past what you agreed to, one 'small favor' at a time, until you're building a bigger job for the original fee.
See it
What it is
Scope creep is the project quietly growing past what you priced, one reasonable-sounding request at a time. Nobody ever asks for a second project. They ask for a favicon, then a favicon for dark mode, then a quick landing page for the launch, and eight weeks later you are three weeks over on the same fee.
It is almost never malice. It is the gap where a boundary should be: vague deliverables, no exclusions list, no revision cap, and several stakeholders who each feed you requests without seeing the total. Software people know the same pattern as feature creep, and the structural cure is identical: make the scope countable, then route every new ask through a change order instead of a shrug.
Gotcha: the killer request is the tiny one. Saying yes to five free 'two-minute' changes teaches the client that requests are free, so the sixth one is a full redesign delivered with the same casual tone. The fix is not to say no, it is to say 'yes, that's a change order' every single time, starting with the first small one.
Ask AI for it
Audit the project scope below for scope creep risk. For each deliverable: flag any wording that is unbounded ('etc.', 'as needed', 'ongoing support', 'a few pages') and rewrite it as a countable, finishable item. Then output three things: an exclusions list of the adjacent work clients typically assume is included, a revision cap with the wording for it, and a two-sentence change order clause I can paste into the contract. Be blunt about which line item will blow up first.