Ask HN: Freelancer's Dilemma – Client Won't Pay Despite Clear Agreement

In addition to the advice that's given here, make sure you detach yourself from both the process and the outcome as soon as possible.

After you had your lawyer send them an angry letter (twice) and you haven't got your money after two months, you need to emotionally accept that the money is likely gone, and make sure that you are mentally capable of focusing on ensuring your financial stability.

Either set an automated mail to remind them what they owe if it's a small amount of money (i.e. less than 5k) and if it's more ask your lawyer if they or someone they know can handle the case on a fixed price basis.

And then move on. Non paying clients absolutely suck. I haven't had one that didn't pay at all (though some very late payers), but I've had friends tell stories and it can wreck your freelance experience. If you let them get to you then you'll lose the feeling of freedom and all advantages of freelancing. Accept that it's part of the game and account for it in your financial planning. If you don't the stress will eventually kill all enjoyment of being a freelancer.

(Btw, I don't mean give up. Just dissociate from the outcome. If the only fee your lawyer would take is 100%, still do it to f with the lousy client.)

As a palette cleanser and loin girder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U (You already guessed it was Mike Monteiro.)

For this project:

Did they refuse to pay actively ("We won't pay you."), or passively (No replies to emails.) The latter might be incompetence.

As others mentioned, specific legal advice depends on respective jurisdictions, but an offical lawyer's letter sometimes wakes up legal when accounting is drifting.

Did you deliver the final access to the code / server / credentials? If not, gently bring servers, DBs, platforms to a halt pending final payments.

Future projects:

Contract, always.

Up-front commencement payments, always.

Price yourself higher in the initial quote, and ask for staged payments, such that by the time your delivery schedule is 50-75% done you are 100% paid.

You control the source code accounts, you control the server credentials, you control the database access credentials, you hand over final access after the final check has cleared.

The best advice in this common mal practice is setting as base law court your jurisdiction; the farer the better.

For instance, I am in Spain and I always signed contracts based in California, etc. Badly done! Next time I will set Madrid, Spain courts as ruling law.

This way you can sue the ass off them and make them pay the money in debt and even some more to the courts.

edit: typo

Back in my freelance days I had a client who refused to pay. I took him to small claims court and won. Actually collected the money.

- small claims court is very easy and relatively quick. no need for a lawyer.

- there is a cap on the amount, so I won $10k, not the full amount owed. But close enough and much better than $0.

- make every reasonable attempt to resolve this prior to filing but, as stated throughout this thread, do not stress yourself out. This should be a fire-and-forget process. Consider the money lost, and if you win, it's just bonus.

Yes, I have handled a situation like that once, in which the client refused to pay and cut off all communication. It was a remote cross-border gig, and there was no way I could afford a lawyer in the client's country.

After struggling with the problem for a few weeks, I located a debt-collection company, and decided to offer the debt to them, and all related documentation, so they could collect it for themselves. I then informed the client of my intentions via email. I said: I'm never going to see this money, but neither are you.

They got back to me within a couple of hours, and paid before the end of the week.

Are you close to them? I hired someone (a friend) to go to their office and present the invoice in person. They told him that the finance guy was out, so he said, “I’ll wait” and he made himself comfortable in a chair. They paid him the full amount around 10 minutes later.

YMMV!

You could probably turn it over to a professional collection company as well.

First, check into who owns the code. With most Work for Hire agreements in the US, the client owns the code.. it may be squishy/unclear on when that ownership occurs. When I still consulted regularly, I had a lawyer note that ownership is not transferred until all invoices are cleared. It was never challenged in court but gave me some leverage.

Second, understand where the code/system currently is. If it's on your server (defined as a server you own or rent), you have different options than if it's on their server.

If it's your server - unless you have a commitment to continue providing the service - you may be able to shut it off immediately.

If they have granted you access to their server for the "duration of the project", you may be able to make the argument that the project isn't over yet and do things.. but speak to an attorney.

Either way, if this is a mission critical app for them, disrupting their business can cause other difficulties for you that you don't want.

Collect the information you have - agreements, records of payments, commitments (written are best, verbal are usually worthless), and ownership - and speak to an attorney. In the US, many lawyers will speak with you for 30 minutes for free as they evaluate your case and lay out options.

I'm 100% freelance -- my engagements tend to be monthly retainer or monthly invoices, and whenever possible I try to avoid contracts because there's simply no way on Earth an unpaid invoice for max 30 days of work would exceed the costs of taking somebody to court (and actually collecting the money) if they don't pay. Not to mention that somebody who refuses to pay for a month isn't going to willingly pay out the remainder of a broken contract.

My clientele is found mostly word of mouth, people I actually know (or have worked with in the past in a W2/corporate environment). I find the most success working with digital agencies and small businesses because they both have strong incentives to pay well (and pay on time).

I treat the work I do as service, rather than something more impersonal (strict deliverables, generic staff augmentation, etc) -- at the end of the day, my role is to help them solve real, immediate problems for their business by being patient, present, cheerful and competent help.

In the unlikely event of a client relationship souring, I just let it go. Chalk it up to the game, use it as fuel for bigger and better things, whatever. I guess I can only do that because I keep everything piecemeal, bite-sized, running in tandem to each other, and have many pans in the fire at any given time.

Anyways, apologies for the tangential rant -- other commenters have offered very effective and actionable advice for your particular situation. I figured I'd just chime in on how I've managed to avoid the situation most of the time.

Some good advice in here but one note of caution: you mention that you work through different platforms, and that you completed this project "outside of these platforms". It is fairly common for these platforms to require you to agree to terms that prohibit you from working directly with clients that you initially connected with on the platform. If you met this client on a platform like that and then violated your agreement with the platform, then you may have some legal exposure there, possibly including exposure that your client could leverage in a negotiation or legal proceeding.

More generally, this kind of situation demonstrates that these platforms do in fact provide value to the parties involved. So if you're a freelancer and you're considering working directly with clients, be aware of the risk of non-payment.

Look into invoice factoring services. You sell your invoices to them and get paid upfront. They get a % of your invoice and/or a small processing fee.

Ideally you want a non-recourse factoring agreement (the one where the factoring company takes most of the risk of non-payment), but it might be difficult to get. It helps if you can show that your previous clients paid on time. But then again the freelancing platforms handled that for you.

In any case, it's worth asking around. Have your lawyer review the factoring terms before you agree to anything.

Can you put a licence fee checker into the code?

I’ve quietly released license enforcement into a client’s system before. They paid up very quickly.

“Your licence has expired. Please contact xxxx for a new license”

just let it go and move on... don't let the negative energy eat you up, it's just not worth it.

i was screwed out of over 6 months of pay north of $50k. i wasn't keep tabs on the payments and i wasn't keeping detailed records of my work. both things i no longer let slide in any way. i spoke to many people and lawyers, but decided to move on and let it go.

in the end how much money and time and energy do you want to spend on another lousy human being or entity? it only hurts you emotionally and takes up valuable time to focus on more productive things. ten years later it's a blip in my life that forced me to learn and be better about picking clients and billing, etc. don't let the 10% ruin your work with the other 90%.

IANAL but I would have a lawyer send a letter to their CEO.

I faced this once in 25 years. I sued, won, and then the company declared bankruptcy.

I guess it depends on how big the client is— bigger clients are easier to pin down… and it also depends on how much they owe you (in my case, it was $25,000)… but my general suggestion is: walk away. Warn your community not to work with them. Be smarter next time.

Smarter how? Well, you could have withheld the final product until you got paid. This is really the only leverage an independent has.

Does having a "Wall of Shame" make sense? Basically put details on a shared google sheet with names, details etc., so that: a. Other freelancers can avoid them. b. They know about it...

Would that work?

What country/state are you from, what country state is your client from and how much money are we talking about? In the US there is a fairly straightforward process to sue someone in small claims court without a lawyer and with fairly small fees. But small claims courts are limited to small awards.

I have not worked as a freelance programmer nor hired any, but a friend really likes to hire freelancers for various projects and often asks me for advice and tells me about his travails. I think practically speaking, it is not that hard for a freelancer to get paid because software always needs upkeep for bugfixes or updates to work with other software or to add new features. And it is far far far more expensive to have a second freelancer look at the first freelancers code and do the updates.

Some people say it takes more time to read code than to write it. I am not sure if that is true but very often if you ask a second freelancer to do minor updates on another freelancers code, the second guy will just say that the code is so awful the whole thing has to be rewritten from scratch. So you have a big advantage just by having written the stuff and having the code in your head and written in your style. You are the best man to fix it and update it by far.

My friend always pays his bills but he is a very tough negotiator, and often gets comparatively good bargains for freelance work. However, all the benefits of his bargains disappear when he needs the software to be changed a bit in six months or so. Then the freelancer is in the drivers seat and my friend completely drops his tough negotiator stance and becomes super nice and friendly towards the freelancer.

So if you do not want to pay for lawyers and small claims court is not suitable for some reason, you may just send a demand letter saying that you are charging a 20% penalty for non-payment and interest will accrue in the future, and just wait for your client to need some update and then you demand that all previous invoices be satisfied before discussion for new work even begins.

IANAL, this is not legal advice. If the sum is a large amount, it would probably be best to consult a lawyer.

Everyone is talking about the legal approaches, or fine print of contracts, and so on.

But if you want the real answer, like what actually works, then try to shame them in public or to people they care about.

Like if the CEO posts on LinkedIn, post underneath saying "How do you reconcile this with not paying your freelancers?"

Send an email with every single person at the company you have an email address for, ideally including the top people, copied, and ask them the same question, while asking if this is a common problem at the company, like are you guys all getting your paychecks on time, or is this just something you do with freelancers.

If your client has case studies or a list of their client's logos on their website take a guess at who their contact would be at that client and reach out to them via email, copying your contact at the offending company as well, asking them if they've had any issues with financial misconduct at the offending company during their engagement with them, because you have.

Clearly there are pros and cons to this approach, and your own reputation to think about, as well as fully burning the relationship and so on.

But assuming you're OK with all that, this tactic, unlike the others suggested, is completely free and exremely fucking effective.

I spent 13 years as a freelance consultant at my own company, or at small consultancies I worked for. This happened to me a few times.

First off, if possible, you want to stage your contract with multiple deliverable milestones, each associated with them giving you money. When they pay you, you move on to the next stage. It's more upfront work, and more oversight, and just generally more complicated than "I work for a couple of months and then throw the whole thing over the fence, and you throw me a bag of money from the other side". But, the upside for you is less risk and a steadier source of income.

For the client, it builds in more opportunities for feedback, including the opportunity to say "I don't want to work with this guy anymore," or "actually, I'm running out of money and I want to pump the breaks", so it reduces their risk as well.

I never took anyone to court; I guess I got lucky.

I recognize none of this has answered your question. The only real advice I have is that there's got to be a reason they are refusing to pay. If they don't have the money, unfortunately you are probably never going to get paid, even if you take them to court. If they do have money, and are just unsatisfied about something (not necessarily your fault, it's often just a misunderstanding) then I would do everything in my power to figure out what is wrong and fix it. Word-of-mouth referrals are so important to contracting, and often just being really high-touch and communicative with the client—and yeah, occasionally giving them a few hours of free work to indulge their petty whims—can turn an angry client into a happy, paying customer.

Have they given any reason for not paying or disputed the invoice in any way? Which jurisdiction applies to the agreement? Many jurisdictions have fastlane procedures for collecting on undisputed claims that you might be able to use.

Slightly tongue in cheek, do you still have access to the code and deployment? https://github.com/kleampa/not-paid

No delivery of code until paid in full. Demo on servers you control.

Always have a contract, even for smaller bits of work. That’s the foundation of a good business relationship.

If they have the money to pay, but are ignoring you then escalate from your contact at the company to someone higher in the chain. If that doesn’t work and it’s a relatively small amount of money then you can try to enforce the contact.

I’m in the UK and there’s a small claims court for specifically this. I’ve not gone through it myself but from those that have it’s simple enough to do yourself without paying a lawyer, but it’s time consuming. Im not sure where you are but look into if there’s in in your jurisdiction.

If the client likely doesn’t have the money to pay, then it’s likely a waste of time to pursue it. I had this happen recently when a client went under and ended up just writing it off as a loss. Luckily it was only my time that was wasted so not the end of the world.

My dad did a house renovation job for a lawyer once. It was a ship of Theseus deal where it was really an entirely new house but for local rules they had to do it as a renovation. Anyways, at the end the lawyer delayed payments on several invoices and then on the last one made it close that he had no intention of paying. He welcomed my dad to sue him but let him know that he would make sure the lawsuits lasted many years.

One good rule is to never work for lawyers. Another is to stop work at the first sign of a delay in payment. Lastly, at the very least leave something critical unfinished until paid everything back due.

One of my very first freelance projects something like this happened to me. They were fishy from the beginning - it was a pretty simple project, gluing together some CRM stuff with some other system via API calls + Python. I scoped it out, gave them an estimate they agreed to, but they decided they first wanted to see a "POC" (which is now a red flag for me, in this case I did notice that, and made sure it was a very rough copy).

I used an API key that was scoped to precisely me and my personal email account. They liked my POC, but kept getting sketchy on negotiation/payment, so I quit the project.

Several months later I was getting usage alerts from my API token sent to my personal email. Turned out they were using what I had written (wasn't surprised). I simply disabled the key, and the way it was set up I very much doubt they were able to fix it on their own.

The lesson I learned is to never trust a client and that lesson has served me well since. If there is any amount of money you are uncomfortable lighting on fire if still unpaid, insist on being paid up front.

Best defense is to not be there.

With new clients, they pay half up front or we don't start. I've refunded part of this amount a handful of times if some part of the process doesn't work out for whatever reason, so I don't spend or invest the money until the project is done.

It's not just that you're losing less money if the client decides not to pay. It's also that your clients are more likely to pay: a client who is willing to pay up front isn't stingy with money. These clients are better in a lot of other ways, too.

I think in 5 years of doing this, I've been turned down by 2 clients because of this. I freelanced a year before I started having this policy, I was turned down by 1 client after giving an estimate.

Repeat clients, I don't make them pay up front. I might reconsider that if a client was significantly late on a payment, but so far that hasn't been a problem, possibly because the up-front pay half filters out clients likely to pay significantly late. I say "significantly" because I've on occasion waited as much as 2 weeks for payments, but in those cases I believe it was due to disorganization rather than any malicious intent.

EDIT: One thing that I think makes clients willing to pay half up front is that typically I try to break the project into as small of chunks as possible, with a truly minimal viable product being released up front. The first contract is for the first chunk, and the half up front is for that chunk. This results in a smaller initial payment, as a lot of my initial contracts are in the range of $4000-$8000.

This also incentivizes them to agree to breaking up projects--some clients want to sign one big contract for a $250k two year project, but balk at paying half of that up front--and when the project finishes faster and for far less than they initially wanted to sign for, I gently remind them how much money I saved them.

Additionally, a lot of the value I bring to the table is this sort of process improvement. I've been in contact with a few clients a few years after we worked together, and found out that they were still doing the small-releases process I brought in. I'm not going to call it agile because a lot of these companies were doing "Agile" before--that word basically doesn't mean anything any more, unless you're really clear about defining it as defined by the Agile Manifesto.

You say “final invoice”. So I’m guessing you were paid something. You might have gotten paid all you’re going to get.

Let me explain. I don’t know much experience you have with how your customers valuing your work product. Under some circumstances you may have maxed out the value of your work. If you want to keep working with them, or within the community that you share with them, again, you may want to let it go. There’s a lot of moralistic reasons why you may have reached some kind of limit. And from personal experience I know it’s next to impossible to appreciate them at this moment.

But if they were impossible, and you overdelivered, solved the problem with grace and generosity—and still believe you are owed your final invoice…nothing short of legal intervention will jump start a non-paying client.

That said, I saw this little nothing viddy on instagram. It’s a funny FU

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8meIe6OQpr/

Platforms charge a fee, but in the end, this may be the one thing they do well in most cases. Protect payments.

In the future for domestic transactions, just add a little clause like "If valid payment is not made by due date, provider can send client a 3 day notice to cure. if the balance is not paid, Client stipulates to default judgement for the purpose of collections."

Now I'm sure that is not legally phrased correctly, but someone could make it a better. Idea is, Client, if they have not disputed invoice and not paid, admit to a default and you are immediately off to a judgement and collection.

Screening clients is tough. And sooner or later, this happens.

Oh, one guy I know always inserted code in his work so that he could turn his code off is someone did not pay. And then showed a screen with a payment message. Nice.

I offer a 15-20% discount for payment upfront. I basically view it as insurance against late/never payments.

Good advice here.

2 months ago I faced an almost same issue. Best is to forget it.

Build your positioning such that you command higher prices, better clients & take 50% deposit minimum before starting the work.

Look into Jonathan Stark.

Another thing is to name & shame them. Just state the facts on social media.

Maintain a blacklist of clients & share them woth your fellow freelancers.

I'm into marketing & maintain such a list. About 7-8 people/agencies in there. Not everyone in there didn't pay. Someone was a micro-manager, someone was scope creep, someone demanded unnecessary things during interview process, wasted a lot of my time etc.

Don’t push code to customers until the invoice is paid. They are not clients; “client” implies a fiduciary relationship. We are not lawyers. We are builders. Get into the blue-collar mindset, and shit like this stops happening.

It all depends on the country you live in and if you have a legal contract. In UK for example you can use a debt collection agency. Those guys will probably give you 50% of the amount and then it's their problem.

I always point people who are thinking of doing freelancing at this classic video from Mike Monteiro:

Fuck you, pay me (2012).

https://youtu.be/jVkLVRt6c1U?si=a6qzrzrLOjv8T-LK

Man that sucks. My advice is, do everything in your hand from a legal perspective - consult a lawyer, it should be free - show them you're serious about your work.

If you still have no answer, expose them! Write a blog or an article about their malpractice. Publish the code you wrote for them if you can. Perhaps, that will draw their attention.

Put an equal amount of effort in proportion to the amount of money you're owned. If your effort becomes too great, drop it and spend your time elsewhere.

If you're working on an hourly basis, you can ask the client to sign a retainer agreement and have them make an up front payment into an escrow account that you draw from as you complete work hours. It's less complicated to implement than it sounds. When the account gets low, warn the client and ask them to make another retainer payment, and if the account gets to zero, cease working on the project until the retainer account is topped up again.

Can your client actually pay? If not pursuing legal actions will just be a waste of money.

In general breakdown payment for larger projects into smaller installments / subprojects.

Use it as a learning experience and move on. I use only hourly billing, that way I get paid and customer sees continuous progress.

Yep. I was a freelance technical consultant for 10 years. Stanford University School of Medicine wouldn't pay my invoices. All you can do is keep asking politely for weeks or months. If they don't, then you might name and shame because there might not be anything else you can do except sue.

As an aside, I am curious about something. I've recently been working with a contractor and I've had to make payments at various stages along the way (10% up front, 20% after framing, 20% after drywall, etc...). Do software freelancers do the same? That way, if nothing else you get _some_ money?

Although it doesn't help with your current problem: for future projects, consider demanding payment in installments, linked to project milestones. When the final invoice is small, the motivation for unscrupulous clients to stiff you becomes less, and if they do, the downside for you is also less.

You either need to get better in selecting clients with money or in proving your value in the relationship so that client wants to keep using you and not burn bridges.

Back to your money: You likely lost it. If they have assets you can threaten them with legal means but I'm experience it never worked.

Going to the legal system without a lawyer just made me waste 500£ and I didn't recoup anything. It would have been money better spent if I paid a hacker to steal his crypto

I had some kind of opposite situation once, a client decided to implement a non scalable shortcut instead of solving the issue in the proper way - then called me after 2 years asking me to fix it or to pay him back his money (something like 2k£). He threatened legal action, I knew the court case would cost him more than that and I just explained the unfairness of the situation and then ignored him.

Court would be your next move, unfortunately. Small claims?

Was there a contract?

Oh you just revived sweet memories of my times as a freelancer.

As a freelancer, it's sometimes hard to get around the simple idea that you are your own company and that you must act like one: protect and defend your work at all cost. It took me months of time wasted, and thousands of dollars of work stolen to accept the fact I need to change my behaviour, as a freelancer you have roughly two approaches:

- set boundaries early on, don't start any work with a predefined and agreed upon down payment, if the work is more than a few days long: set milestones as need be with payments required.

- lawyer up, be flexible with clients (delays in payments are a common occurrence with any company) but don't be afraid to go after dishonest clients, if you can't afford it or don't feel like going this path then you need to set up as many contingencies as possible upfront (see previous point).

A classic video that might help you get in the right mindset: https://youtu.be/jVkLVRt6c1U

Others have addressed the process to get paid (legal, factoring, collections etc). And tinco's comment (currently top) on disengaging emotionally is essential reading. I thought it might be useful to describe what some classes of non or late payer look like from the inside:

1) We're solvent, and promised you two week terms - but our accounting dept doesn't work like that.

In this case, whoever signed the contract should have flagged that they can't execute two-week terms. But sometimes their eyes have glazed over before they get to that bit of the contract - or they don't know how their accounting dept works (often with a monthly payment run). In this case, the contractor is likely to eventually be paid. But getting paid on the actual terms would only happen if you have enough leverage to get an executive to force the accounting dept to make an exception, and do it every single time.

2) We're solvent but have a cash flow problem.

Here, a company will push back payments until its cash flow problem is resolved. But that could be months, or even longer. They will make the most critical payments each months - for things that they rely on going forward, like their cloud provider, DNS etc. At this point the engineering team will learn (if they didn't already) to make sure they get notifications of non-payment for critical services, rather than relying on accounting to be able to triage them. Your payment depends on having some kind of leverage - providing a critical service is best, but being the squeaky wheel can also work, as there may be some cash left after the critical ones. Being paid consistently, but always late, is another sign - this means the accounting dept has a hole, but it's of fixed size and they've 'solved' it by taking a float from all their creditors. In this case, you are likely to be paid - eventually.

3) We are about to go bust. This looks rather like 2, except that you won't get consistently paid even late, and their other contractors are also likely to not be being paid. If the company is gambling for resurrection, they may even be more engaging on the actual work side, if they think your work is part of what will save their bacon. Legally, incurring debts if you know that you're insolvent is fraud (at least in the UK). But, that hard to prove and only applies if there isn't some chance of not going bust. I suspect that if there's a big chance of going bust, there's actually a propensity to spend more on contractors - since the chances are that they won't need to pay. Sometimes a company structures itself so that it can make a subsidiary insolvent but keep going. This might be identifiable from filings, but I'm not an accountant so I can't advise how. Although, I'm not going to work again for a company where the CEO has made himself a creditor secured against the company IP....

Others that I don't have any insight into, perhaps others can comment:

4) We are a big company and can get away with X month terms regardless of the contract

5) Shenanigans are our way of doing business. We think of it as "playing hardball".

In my case, I always work with 100% payment upfront, eliminates the problem completely.

Thank you for your advice and guidance. I have learned a lot.

Contracts themselves don't force people to pay, courts do.

What country are you in? What country is your client in?

Yeah. The downside of working with people is that many people are truly horrible. It sounds like your client is simply stealing from you, probably with some half-assed argument that is pure bullshit but designed to go in circles and make you crazy.

Going forward, remember to structure your work so that you minimize your exposure to this risk: get paid upfront, don't let the unpaid balance get too large, etc.

And try not to let it get under your skin. It's not you - it's them. And they are horrible.

if you're in the same geo - small claims court.

otherwise, consider it lost + name and shame

turn off the servers until they pay