A project manager (client owner) hired me to work on his project w/o a signed contract. I gave him a quote about certains tasks.
I started working on the project and it turns out the environment (vagrant w/ ansible) is very complex to setup on my computer. The whole website is very badly optimized as well and I didn't expect to spend so much time setting it up. I don't know how to handle that from my side. I recently asked him to pay 30% of my time and he don't want to pay for that. It's a well-known vagrant, but it's a mix of learn and debug.
I'm a senior developer and it's not my first environment. The issue was actually a problem with High Sierra w/ APFS. I wasted more than 30h on the problem that I can't charge and he's not sure he want to hire me anymore because of the 2-3 weeks I delayed his project.
What would you do in a similar situation?