Great great article and agree that estimating is often inaccurate and usually a waste of time. Having worked in a product company I’ve seen it fail time and time again.

That being said, now working in a services company, unfortunately you do need some form of estimation to let your client know how deep their wallet needs to be, as many usually aren’t fans of happily paying the initial high retainer fee for an infinite amount of time and want to get from “startup” mode and into “long term mode” as quickly as possible.