Freelancers: Payment Refused. Now What?
I’ve been doing freelance work for some time now. It’s generally a very smooth process. I send them a quote. They pay 50% upfront. I complete the work in a timely fashion, turn the product over to them for final testing, and then they pay me the remainder of the balance.
I’ve been happy with all my clients, until recently. A client hired me to customize and tweak 7 blogs he owned. We agreed upon an hourly rate and he payed a two-hour security deposit upfront. The customizations only took a few days and any time I asked a question he answered very promptly. He was friendly, and nice to work for. He even talked about future projects he might hire me for. So everything seemed fine.
At the end of the project I tallied up my hours and sent him the final invoice. A few days passed by and I sent him another friendly reminder. It’s now been nearly two months of me contacting him with no response back. As a freelancer, what am I to do?
Well, I did something that may be controversial. I “repossessed” his site until the final payment is made. See, the customizations I did require cPanel, FTP, and administrative WordPress access. Thus I had all opportunities to change the administrative passwords until the payment was made. As a freelancer am I allowed to deny a client access to his site if he is refusing payment? If I give MORE then adequate time for payment, send several invoices, and genuinely try to settle the dispute in other means and still don’t receive any contact from the client are extreme measures warranted?
What do you think guys?
It’s an interesting issue, previous advice i’ve heard regarding it is that your perfectly within your rights to take a site offline or post a message on the site. Unless you have some tight contract with the client which lays out another course of action that should be taken in the event of non payment.
The bit you have to be careful about is how you do it. You may want to stop short of saying, “they haven’t paid me” for all the world to see. Perhaps simply crafting a fake hosting error or “down for maintenance” page, will probably get the message across to the client, and if not, they’ll ask why the sites down.
I’ll be interested to know how it all turns out. It’s a situation we hope never to find ourselves in, but something we all have to be prepared for.
That makes me laugh! Make sure you go about the right routes to receive payment.
Daniel:
Thanks for your input. I’m still waiting to see how this one plays out. I agree with being careful about what error message appears. I’ve decided to change the message to a more generic one. Sometimes it can get hard to seperate emotions from business. :)
Crock:
I’ve been going about the “right routes” for about two months now. The funny part is that this guy who I did work for is a freelance web design guy himself. Just goes to show you never can tell!
Thanks for the comments guys.
I’m sorry for this set back. =(. But yeah, I would have followed the same course of action that you did. Afterall, you’ve given him plenty of time and he won’t even respond to your follow-ups. Stick to your professional methods, and hopefully this will get resolved soon buddy!
To hell with playing nice. You provided a service, he needs to pay up. I’d put a nice big banner on his site saying he didn’t pay, so you reclaimed the services you provided to him. Do it on all the pages you worked on for him.
Hope it works out for him.
Might want to think about using a contract in the future. If he breaks it, you can sue him for what he legally and rightfully owes you. I’m sure there are contracts out there for freelancers.
So whatever happened with this? Did he pay?
Great question. Nope, he never paid. He managed to recover his cPanel password (which I had changed), but he’s still locked out of six WordPress blogs he hired me to do some customizations on. I changed their themes back to the standard, dull WordPress theme. They’ve been like that since I published this article and he’s not even sent me an email.
So doesn’t look like I’m getting paid for this one!
If it is worth it (more than $300), file a claim in YOUR local small claims court and have him served with a subpeona. Hopefully, he lives more than 1,000 miles away. If he doesn’t appear in court, he will lose, by default for failure to appear. That would mean you win be default, and then there is the judgement in your favor for the total amount, plus court costs, legal fees, and hell, go for INTEREST (21 percent), as well as punitive damages! Tack on emotional duress, too! Then turn it over to a collection agency that takes a 10-to-20 percent cut (yes, there are some) and you get your money.
Of course, you will never do business with this guy again if you take this route, but … I wouldn’t do business with him again — even if he paid me 100 percent of my fees, PLUS 100 percent bonus fee upfront.
Spot on with this article.Great info.Great blog hope you do well with articles like this:)
Put your adsense code on his 6 blogs, until the balance is paid.
Then release his blogs back to him, with a thank you note, saying thank you for full payment! :)