Freelance Programmer Survival Manual

It lacks the most important advice: charge more.<p>&#62; I will give a lower price to a customer who I believe to have good character, and I would hike up the price if he is a demanding or difficult to deal with type<p>Please don't. Your beliefs don't matter. Even the coolest guy can come out as a PITA or a scammer. Or even if he's cool, he can have partners who will make your life a living hell. In the end, it's all about the money. Just charge what you're worth, so you don't regret it.

IMHO, Nothing like agile for freelancing.. every week the customer gets a solid deliverable, every week I get a real paycheck. If at any time the customer does not like my work or I don't like the customer, we can always part ways, what is done is all 100% his, (documentation, source code etc)<p>Worst case scenario.. I am out a week's work.<p>*so far, I've never been stiffed.

The upfront depends on the project as well; some projects have less, some have more; depends on the size and the number of milestones. If you have, say, a project of $10k with 4 milestones, I would never do a 30/70 payment. Rather 30/10/10/20/30 or something.<p>Also, you can use the popular agile approach which is popular; in that case you define stories per sprint (which in smaller projects are a week usually) and every monday morning you agree with the client upon the stories to be done that week. When you finished the last story, the client needs to pay the price for that week and go on with the next week. This keeps both sides alert and doesn't allow for slacking on both sides. It can go very wrong if you agree to too much, then you get the dark side of agile which means you'll be working every weekend 24 hours/day to make that monday morning.

I found it interesting that he barely touched what I feel is the most important part of freelancing: marketing. Yes, right now you can name your price if you are a good developer, but how do you show that, and how do you evaluate projects? (I know he touched on what kind of clients to keep.)<p>When I freelanced, I evaluated clients on three criteria:<p>* had I worked with them in the past?<p>* did I know anyone who had worked with them in the past?<p>* everyone else<p>If I trusted them or people who had worked with them, it made the engagement easier all around (though you still need a contract!).<p>As far as finding new clients, I relied on word of mouth, which probably didn't lead to as many opportunities as would have occurred if I was more active in various communities, but I was ok with that at the time.<p>Also, I wonder what the author moved on to?

Same comment I put on the blog, but keen to hear HN responses. Why do so many freelancers gravitate to small(er) clients? It seems to lead to direct competition with platforms such as freelancer.com, odesk, elance, etc which is impossible for a local freelancer.<p>Clients like digital and creative agencies, funded startups and corporates (managers that don't have access to internal dev resources, but still have dev needs). They use freelancers and they don't come with a lot of issues small clients have.<p>Interested to hear from freelancers as to how and why they work for smaller clients.

I will never try doing anything without a 3rd party technically guaranteing me payments (like the odesk.com which bills people automatically per-screenshot using money pre-blocked from their CCs - absolutely no excuse can exist to avoid payment).

I have also found most (if not all) points here to be true. Good essay.