A quote that doubles along the way is almost never the sign of a dishonest supplier. It is the sign of a project that was priced before it was understood.
What scoping produces
A week of scoping produces no code. It produces a list of screens, a list of roles, a list of integrations and a list of what is explicitly out of scope. That last list is the most useful: it is the one that prevents misunderstandings three months later.
Why it pays
The cost of a change rises with the moment you discover it. Changing a line in a scoping document costs five minutes; changing the same rule once it is spread across fifteen screens and a database costs two weeks. Scoping is not an expense on top of the project, it is moving an expense to the moment when it is cheapest.
It is not scoping that is expensive, it is what you discover without it.
What we ask during that week
Little, but precisely: who will use the tool, what they do instead today, which systems already exist, and what event will let you say the project succeeded. Without that last answer there is no project, only an order.
And if the budget is tight?
Then scoping matters even more. It identifies the half of the scope that delivers most of the benefit and defers the rest, instead of doing everything by halves.