I was owed $5k. I tried to hold them accountable (opens in new tab)

I think a better strategy would be to send an email as soon as the payment was late, saying a late fee would be assessed in x days if payment is not received (or just include the late fee in the contract, I suppose). Attaching an arbitrary late fee without any notice seems strange to me, but I don't do freelancing so I guess I don't really know. It just seems like any fees should be documented somewhere, and people should be allowed to accept/reject them before entering into a contract.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure what the legality of this was so I'm not recommending it - but it proved effective in my case.

I was owed several thousand dollars by a client and they were several months late in making a payment. They strung me along for a while but at some point it was no longer worth my time.

Realizing I wasn't interested in any future work from the client I simply took their site down and emailed the owner asking for payment. I suspected they'd try to get the site back up (it was in their AWS account) but the owner replied right away asking for my Paypal address.

The late fee needs to be in your contract and clearly stated on the invoice. (And even then, companies will sometimes push back against that at contract negotiation time.)

If you don't have a signed contract, you don't have real receivables.

A friend was once owed about $2k, and did not receive payment on time. She phoned up the person processing payments, who told her that essentially the person running the shop had instructed them not to pay her.

She sent an email to the head of the company (small media company that works on documentaries), who told her that she would not get paid because there was a "grammatical error" in her work, and if she continued to ask for payment they would not hire her again (now I should mention the person she was working with was happy with the work, she gave them the opportunity to ask for alterations and they told her that the work was up to standard and she could bill them).

She fired an email back quoting the contract, and how the company told her in writing that they were happy with her work. Again she was told that she would not get paid and should stop asking or they wouldn't work with her again. She then got a lawyer to write to them and threaten legal action. They paid her that day, along with what a phone call from the boss calling her a "useless c*nt" along with a bunch of other insults directed towards the fact that she was female.

It's pretty ridiculous to me to charge a late fee on net-30, especially when you want to work with a client again in the future. My best paying clients (e.g. multinationals) generally always pay late by one to a few weeks.

As long as you know they're good for the money and know they will pay it is a cost of doing business.

This is how I’ve handled it in the past. I remind them about being late, if they pay immediately, I let it go. If they don’t, they get put on a retainer agreement for all future work.

Only one time I had to go nuclear and send a dunning letter with the “If I don’t receive payment within 45 days, I will have no choice but to pursue legal remedies”. The check arrived on day 43.