To play devil’s advocate, to me plaintext means I want to finish quickly because you haven’t asked and are paying too little, while any solution other than bcrypt/pbkdf2 means I don’t know what I’m doing.
Having once run my own freelance web dev company, I feel very comfortable saying that I would not take a project where I wasn't getting paid enough to bother hashing passwords. That's beyond justification. Either reject the client or protect their users.
Some sources now recommend argon2 over those two, could that be another right answer?
This should be part of the job, no matter how tight the budget is. Password hashing is quite accessible in almost every language and I can't think of any excuse not to hash passwords.