I did it. I finally fucking did it.

After a year of anxiety, entire months of wasted time, bashing my head against the wall trying to solve stupid issues that should not have been there in the first place, and learning a lot of stuff for the first time, I have finally finished my first real project.

All I have left is to polish up some documentation and then ship it. And then I will actually get paid for the first time.

There are no words to describe the joy of seeing all the pieces falling into place and the project coming to life.

Now, how do you tell a client that you went overtime as fuck?

PS: FUCK SYNOLOGY

You write out additional stuff you had to do, in order to achieve your goals with time spent.
Since the additional stuff is not something the client asked, I doubt they will (want to) pay, unless you disclosed upfront. You can say that there was nothing you could do about it, and give them a discount for the additional work.
That might help with the clients relationship.

If you can put down line items for it, exceeding the estimate by 25% isn't terribly uncommon in this, or really any, field.

* Oh look ! This button blinks red and white !
* By the way, the whole project will cost you 10K more than expected.
* Did I talk about this sidebar which can go left or right ?
* Could you sign this please ?
* Do you know Konami codes ?

@HitWRight @HiFiWiFiSciFi thank you for your suggestions! That seems like a great approach.

The main thing that caused my going into overtime was due to an unexpected issue with the platform I was working on (did I mention that I fucking hate Synology?) to complete one of the design goals.

I had to set up a Wireguard VPN that would autostart on boot. On any systemd-based system it takes just one single command, but Synology does a lot of weird fuckery with Upstart plus a lot of custom shit, so I had to learn how to write an Upstart init module from scratch (which is still buggy af because wg-quick is also weird and the PID tracking doesn't work, but fuck it at least it starts on boot).