I'm not and have never been in your situation but consider this a summary of all anecdotes I've heard mixed with negotiation techniques.
The thing I would personally do is make sure the client has paid their invoice before providing the service. Essentially, this means paying for all previous missed invoices along with the next one. If you make people pay before giving the service, I think you avoid the case altogether.
Now, if you want to be harder: just ban them. Take them to Collections (or whatever the name is in the USA) and then never provide services to them ever again. This sounds really harsh and unfair but by not paying they also know how far they can go without giving you a dime. "Give them a hand and they take the arm."
upfront billing of professional services (“consulting”) is worse for a few reasons, (1) requires the customer to trust you more (they cannot withhold payment if you screw them or violate the contract) but generally the service provider is the riskier party (2) it causes service gaps (lost billable days) when the customer is late which is almost every month, (3) it requires you to define in advance exactly how many units will be billed and causes a service gap when you hit the retainer limit, (4) it gives the customer a natural ability to throttle billable hours which leads to unpredictable revenue. This all leads to higher bill rates, which is less palatable than a commitment to full time services contract. everyone involved wants predictable spend.
if this is an annual renewal payment for a saas, you need a process to follow which must include 60 and 30 day notices before the invoice, the rest varies greatly based on size - is this $1200/yr (credit card auto charge) or $120k (high touch sales rep)
It surely depends on what the OP is providing. If I was a consultant and the company stopped paying, I would obviously stop working for them on the next day. Otherwise, you could start charging weekly or daily instead of monthly. But then again, if they're not paying...
If I was providing a software or utility, the second you stop paying you are out. This actually happened to me in Japan because my mobile provider stopped sending paper invoices so I forgot to pay. I got cut off without any warning and as soon as I paid I got my access back.
Why does the client have pushing rights to the repository? I would suggest working by pull request and approve all changes that they make. That's what you would do if you were working in a team.
If you work in a bigger structure, surely there is a product manager that can limit the scope of the project.
I would suggest to the client to develop their own tools that are to be supported by them exclusively while you continue supporting the "official" tools.
Thanks for the suggestions. I've considered to protect some branches, but in the end decided against it. I was not looking forward to review all their huge amounts of slop code. It would also be different from reviewing code of a "real" developer. Feedback would normally be a way to help each other and improve as a team, and be received with a certain amount of gratitude or at least understanding. In this case, they would not read the feedback, at best they would feed it to a bot. They would see it as a needless obstacle. I agree to scope my parts of the project as much as possible. Then it might still be realistic to continue working on it.
It should be in your contract that you are the sole dev and that the client cannot add code. At best they should be able to send a spec or feature request but not an actual PR.
I don't know how you could word it, but you could tell them to use an LLM to generate specs so that you can understand the needs and implement the features yourself (even if it's also LLM-assisted).
I'm sorry if it comes off as rough, but keep your AI slop out of HN, please. Unless it's obvious that it's an agent, I'm probably not the only one who believes we need human contact on HN and not a statistical machine.
Written English makes plenty of sense, but it's really complicated because you need to know the etymology of the words to understand the logic. It's not just made-up; there's reasons for the "rules" (like why a word is pronounced the way it is, despite the spelling). But new learners don't have time to learn Greek and Latin roots and other such stuff, and under-educated native English speakers won't know much of this stuff either.
The fact is that even native speakers may mispronounce words if it's the first time they say it. For example, words that they encountered in written form only.
Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.
Yes, of course. This happens to me too: there's words I've never heard pronounced, so I don't actually know how to pronounce them (though you can usually solve this by using Google Translate's text-to-speech function).
I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.
I'm sure it used to make sense when words when pronounced differently. Pronunciation changed but not the writing. Which means it doesn't make sense at our point in time.
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500.
But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
I've learned Japanese and I understand your point completely. I can't say for Chinese but in Japanese there are some words (and even kanji) that you can read even if you see it for the first time–if you get better at reading kanji. Some words just make no sense but that's true even for native speakers–especially for place names.
They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.
In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)
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