The Jumping Frog charge relates to an event early on in my career when I made the mistake of offering a client a fixed price for a two hundred page website. Once the design was signed off and the build completed over a three month period, the client requested that each page include a frog jumping around the screen because his wife liked frogs. Purchasing a frog from the local pet store and filming it by holding a camera above and a cigarette lighter behind to persuade it to jump, I spent the next two weeks incorporating it into every page of the website. A few days later, the client described the addition as “very annoying” and requested it be removed and replaced with a 3D animated frog jumping onto the screen, holding a thumb up, and speaking the words “jump on down and grab a bargain.” After providing a quote for this, I was informed that the amendments would be made “under the original fixed price or no payment would be made at all.” The next day, their home page was replaced with a single image of a frog giving the finger and a voice bubble stating “I jump for cash, bitch.”

After fifteen years in the design industry and realising the only difference between sitting in front of a computer facilitating client’s requests and kneeling on the urine soaked floor of a truck stop bathroom giving five dollar blowjobs to men named Chuck is the amount of urine on the floor, the Jumping Frog fee has evolved from insurance against post-project client suggestion to client incentive to have somebody else do it.