Early on, we offered unlimited revisions on every project. It sounded like great customer service. It was actually the single biggest source of missed deadlines and eaten margin in the business's early years.
Unlimited revisions removes the client's incentive to decide. When feedback is free and infinite, there's no cost to sending "actually, can we try it in blue instead" for the fifth time. Not because clients are unreasonable — because nothing in the process signals that a round of feedback is meaningfully different from the last one. Capping rounds (we settled on three structured rounds) forces both sides to consolidate feedback instead of trickling it in one email at a time.
"Unlimited" quietly becomes "indefinite." A project scoped for two weeks with unlimited revisions has no natural end state. We had projects drag past three months not because the work was hard, but because there was never a moment where "done" was the obvious next step. A fixed revision count creates that moment by default.
Vague feedback gets worse, not better, with more rounds. You'd think more rounds means more chances to get it right. In practice, open-ended revision cycles train clients to give reactive feedback ("I don't love it") instead of specific feedback, because there's no pressure to be precise. Fewer, structured rounds — each requiring written, specific notes — produced better final results with less total back-and-forth.
It punishes your best clients to accommodate your worst ones. The client who gives clear, decisive feedback finishes in one round and effectively subsidizes, through the price they paid, the client who needs six. Once we saw it that way, unlimited stopped feeling generous and started feeling like bad pricing design.
We still handle real post-launch issues and small tweaks without nickel-and-diming anyone. What we don't do anymore is treat "revisions" as a bottomless resource — because it never actually was one, we were just absorbing the cost silently instead of pricing it.
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