What is scope creep?
Scope creep is the gradual expansion of a project beyond what was agreed, through a series of small additions that are each too minor to argue about but which collectively consume unpaid time.
It is dangerous precisely because no single request looks unreasonable. "Could you also just…" is individually trivial; the cost is cumulative and is usually only visible once the project is badly over budget in hours.
The defence is a written scope specific enough to be checkable — deliverables, quantities, and a stated number of revision rounds. "A website" cannot be exceeded because it never had an edge. "Five pages, two revision rounds per page" can, which is what makes it useful.
Handling it well is not about refusing. The professional response is to confirm the request is outside the agreed scope, price it, and let the client decide — which reframes an awkward conversation about goodwill as an ordinary one about a change order. Clients rarely object to paying for extra work they explicitly asked for; they object to surprises.
See also
Twin-Gig is the selfnode twin that works on this. See what it does →