Richard’s Ramblings

December seemed to be the month of Screw You. I had a client that I had performed some work for last October that decided in his own way that he wasn’t going to pay the entire amount due for my services already rendered:

I just went over the invoice. I have to admit, your fee is well above what I thought I was going to have to pay especially since we significantly cut back the scope of work from our initial meeting… As we discussed, it was very important to keep my costs low given the likely economics… I want to handle this fairly but I don’t think the current invoice is appropriate. Based on the work we actually wound up doing plus the budget limits we discussed, I believe a fair fee would be [half the price]. It is still more than I had hoped to pay and I realize it is less than you had hoped to receive, but I think it is a fair amount that is consistent with the scope of the project as we executed it. I’ll send a check out for this amount to you today.

My excerpted response:

We met on September 19 at which point you discussed and provided a document of the depth of the project, the original scope of which was to design and create an entire website consisting of about nine web pages, not even including the e-commerce portions of the site. On October 2, you told me to begin work on the project, which I did. On October 3, after I had already actively begun design, you sent a revised document of work, changing the flow and scope. I shifted gears and began following the new route, continuing with the design aspects, transparently emulating [the look and feel of a partner] website. On the 5th, you informed me that the [partner] was creating the design for the marketing piece, and that I was to focus solely on the purchasing aspects — at which point I ended up having to toss away about eight hours of work already performed on this project.

At the same time, you also stated that the budget for my portion of the work could not exceed [$yada $yada], which equated to only a day and a half of my time. You also asked me to do as much of the originally discussed work (i.e. architect the pages for future use of an affiliate program, discount pricing, and multiple store fronts) as possible given the budget constraint. While I was not able to squeeze the discounting features in, I successfully laid in the groundwork for the affiliate program and multiple store fronts. You also got a few minor features that you neither thought of or knew to ask for — including verification of mandatory fields — all in an effort to increase the reliability and stability of the small site…

Up to that point I had only billed you for about half of the hours actually spent on the project so that I would stay within your mandated budget. And that was before I had to research and resolve the technical problems experienced after launch that were caused by incorrect information from [your credit card processing merchant].

You changed the scope of work considerably AFTER work had already progressed. I do not believe that it could be considered “fair” that I bear the full brunt of that financial burden.

Under the consideration that I would like to continue to work with you in the future, I am willing to make a compromise. I will extend a reduction in the rate at which work was billed. [Blah, blah, unimportant monetary details...]

I know the economy isn’t what it was a couple of years ago, but I am sick and tired of people trying to screw everyone else just because it suits them. I mean, come on, you don’t walk into your dentist’s office, have him extract a tooth, and then say, “Sorry! but I don’t think that price is fair so I’ll just pay you $25 because I could have extracted it myself with a piece of string and an available doorknob!”

Human nature frustrates me.

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