Small jobs carry almost the same fixed costs as big ones. Here is how hourly, minimum-plus-hourly, and flat-rate pricing each handle that, and which one holds up.
The four year degree is treated as the safe choice and the thing to do while undecided. It is a large commitment and it deserves to be chosen rather than defaulted into.
The offer refused in month two is often better than the outcome reached in month fourteen, once somebody counts what the intervening year actually took out of them.
Legal work is priced three ways, and the structure you are quoted says what kind of problem the attorney believes you have. That is useful information by itself.
The protection is real, considerably narrower than most owners assume, and easier to lose than anybody expects. The rest of the decision is bookkeeping and habits.
Software handles a simple return well and cannot ask a question. The gap between those two facts is where most of the money in a growing side business sits.