<i>After spending 200+ hours developing the system, not a dime has been seen or given</i><p>Freelancers should always try to get at least a deposit upfront. When I was freelancing, I would get 100% upfront for projects under $500, 50% upfront for projects between $500 and $2000. For projects over $2000, I would get 25% upfront, and then set milestones with payments attached. I had a $7500 project once where the guy made the first 25% payment, I completed the first milestone (graphic comps and UX flowcharts) then he disappeared for a year, not returning phone calls or emails. He then contacted me out of the blue and made the second payment, and I completed the second milestone (HTML/CSS/JS coding), and then he disappeared permanently. Clients like these are exactly the reason you need to get some payment upfront.
For those who would like to avoid this situation, Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) has humorously useful advice for contractors:<p>F*ck You. Pay Me. <a href="http://vimeo.com/22053820" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/22053820</a>
He should have AGPL3'd this code, and put a standing offer for a royalty-free unencumbered free license to anyone who contacts him directly. The net result would have been the same, but his deadbeat client wouldn't get the code for free.
He could have been a bit more vindictive, perhaps a non-osi compliant license like:<p>"This code is licensed under MIT license with one exception: for 5 years, this license excludes any use
which benefits directly or indirectly the current
owners of UnPayingCompany, Inc. On Aug 1st, 2017, the license for this code is MIT without any restriction."
Publicizing your work may be a fun way to 'get back' at an nonpaying client, but is it good for business? Would the professional thing to do be to simply drop work on this client and move on, or is any publicity good publicity for the coder?<p>This is damaging to the client. Yes, they may have deserved it, but will future clients be discouraged by this behavior?<p><i>Edit</i>: To be clear, I'm not saying the coder was in the wrong in any way. That is to be determined based on whatever agreement existed between the coder and client. I'm asking if as a business decision it was wise to release the work. The client now has all of the work, and there is no possibility of reconciliation.
Does someone know under which license is this released? Could not find this anywhere. Without the license specified, the author still retains the copyright.<p>Also, assuming this was a work for hire, not sure who the copyright belongs to (the author or the client) given the non-payment.
This is abandon-ware. I saw a lot of similar projects leaved open sourced which died quickly in no-relevance. What a difference between healthy open source project where you get support and bugs fixed...
My standard contract terms:<p>* Deposit required, typically 25%, depends mostly on the estimated length of the project.<p>* Payment on milestones (typically first beta and completion, possibly more depending on length of project)<p>* I own the IP until paid in full<p>* 50% kill fee less deposit<p>Though, honestly, I prefer day rate over project based fees. If I do a day rate, payment is due every 15 days.<p>It's worth the $1-2K of going to a lawyer and getting a contract boiler plated.<p>It basically boils down to this though: You are in business, act like it. I don't do favors for clients I don't know. Once we establish trust and relationships, I become a lot more flexible.<p>I thought when I started implementing these terms that I would lose business, and I have lost a few projects because of them, but honestly if they can't respect the terms, they probably aren't going to respect your work and you'll be caught in that endless freelance/consultant cycle of hunting down payment.<p>It's your money though, do as you wish.
I worked on a project around a year back (something like fetch.io, but a stripped version) and had a deal with the employer that we'll be sharing the profits that are made from the service. He invested on the servers and the premium accounts with various file hosting services. I took care of the entire application. But he scrapped that project even before the beta is launched saying that the operation costs are more and he see no point in launching the service and also partly because of the legal issues involved in downloading and distributing content from other services. After reading this post, I feel like I should open source the code that I'm not using now.
I suggest incremental payments and a deposit for any work of any size (which this definitely counts of). We do 20% upfront, 50% on adhoc reasonably functional demo, and 30% before uploading to apple/releasing code.<p>My company's iPhone fixed fee contracts state that you surrender all rights to the work after a (long) term of non-payment and still owe the amount due so things just like this can be done when people just disappear off the face of the earth but yet salaries and contractors and artists still need to be paid for all that time.
Asking for a deposit for a project does something very important: it pre-qualifies the party asking for the work in multiple dimensions.<p>Here's what I mean. If they can get you a check cut for a portion of the amount of the project, then you just learned three important things about them: (a) they take you and the project seriously and are committed to your doing it; (b) they have both the signing and check writing authority to commission the project; and (c) they are able to control their organization from their end in order to make the project happen.<p>If it is not a major corporation and you don't get a deposit up front and you just start working, then any number of bad things can happen:<p>- You find out that they never intended to pay and they consider your demands for payment a joke.
- It turns out that they are powerless smurfs with no signing authority
- It turns out that there is absolutely no support for the project internally<p>In any event, it then becomes a crap shoot for you. If you get a deposit it is <i>possible</i> that you may be stiffed on later payments, but it becomes highly unlikelier by orders of magnitude.<p>A signed purchase order from a large company should be enough to go on, I guess. I have always asked for deposits.
Something not noted: he's turned a negative event (getting stiffed) into positive exposure for his work with hundreds of HN readers. At least at a glance, it seems like solid and clean Rails / Ruby code (and I think I've seen some other commenters noting that as well.) I'd be surprised if this post didn't result in at least one new client down the road... nicely played.
The only time I've been stiffed on a contract job was, surely enough, the one time I took the "project manager" I would be working for at her word and didn't require an up-front payment.
I wonder if he has the rights to use the code himself and/or allow others to use the code. The code is likely a product of a combination of specs, discussions, and his own work.
Join the party. As someone who was recently ripped for $12k+, it's nice to see folks fighting back. In my case the work I did continues to remain online and in use by the original owner while I try to get l my client(who runs a sham design agency) into jail for writing returned checks--and having a history and a prior conviction of doing so.
I once came close to opensourcing an applicaton because the client refused to pay. I was making preparations for the opensourcing, but he came trough at the last moment.
Seems to me like this was as good a solution as any. Plus now everyone can use the code, and I bet the individual who didn't pay will think twice about that again.
I keep getting a "Could not find sprockets-2.0.0.beta.10 in any of the sources" error when I try to bundle install. Anyone know what may be causing this?