I was owed $5k. I tried to hold them accountable | Hacker News Reader

I was owed $5k. I tried to hold them accountable

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28 pointsmsrpotus22 comments

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.

In NYC, under the "Freelance Isn't Free Act" (which she mentioned in her emails) paying later than 30 days gives an award of double damages (twice the amount owed).

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/about/Freelanc...

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/workers/FAQs-F...

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/workers/Court-...

I don't work in the area, so I know very little about it and this may seem naive - but I constantly hear adverts for things like Quickbooks - where they'll automatically send invoices and chase up. As I say, I know nothing about the area, but those products are around $20 a month which seems like pretty good value and would leave your clients under no illusion about what they to pay when and with what penalties.

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.

I was sooo tempted to do this with a client who owed me $30K

But I was worried about getting sued by that client.

Yes. What he did is generally not good advice / a good course of action.

What you do is let them know you expect payment in X days, and if not start legal proceedings. And then you follow up on that.

Meh. I wasn’t going to bother getting a lawyer involved for a balance of a few thousand dollars. I did threaten legal action though it proved futile.

Out of curiosity, why was it not a good course of action? Did the client have any leverage after being 6+ months past due on their payment?

I was more referring to the $30k example above. In your situation probably fine for a few thousand, but if someone owes you a significant amount of money then I don't think you should act in this way. You just sue them (if all else fails).

> then I don't think you should act in this way.

What is your rationale? Netflix suspends your account for non-payment, the same should apply to web infrastructure.

Netflix is providing a service. It's on their computer. They are certainly entitled to terminate your access to it. Logging into someone else's AWS account and deleting their stuff is, in the eyes of the law, more akin to Netflix breaking into your house and stealing your TV to stop you watching Netflix when your credit card payment is declined. Or remotely formatting all your computers to make sure you can no longer access your Netflix account. That is not the correct legal path to remedy the problem....it's a felony. It's all well and good to play hardball with people who are not paying you, but the correct way to do that is with lawyers. If you commit a felony first, then they can tell you to go pound sand and your choices are now (a) pound sand or (b) Get your 2 grand or whatever was owed, pay half of it the the lawyer, and then go to jail when they report you to the police out of spite.

Here is the real question...

Can you program in some code to display on the website “this website owner needs to pay for their site” etc.

and if they don’t pay you, you don’t disable it. And it activates after a while. Plus it would have redundant things so they can’t easily just hire one guy to remove it.

Or it could be some thing that breaks the site in a less obvious way and they call you to fix it.

It doesn’t seem to break any laws that I know of. Do you?

I am not a lawyer, and your scenario is getting into the gray zone where you really ought to consult a lawyer to get an even remotely reliable opinion. That said, my understanding is that: You shouldn't get convicted(no crime was committed if you do it right). You might still get arrested(have fun convincing officer donut that you remotely disabled some business's website without hacking). You might get sued in civil court for damages. You may or may not win the civil case depending on the wording of your contract, implementation details of your sabotage, the mood of the judge, and the alignment of the stars. I would still argue that a few hundred bucks to hire a lawyer to send a form letter is safer, easier, and more reliable, assuming of course that the client resides in a country with reasonably strong rule of law. You're trying to use a hacker solution to a lawyer problem, which is both unprofessional and generally frowned on by the legal system.

Lol, with all respect, taking down a companies website even with credentials given to you (for another job) can be construed as hacking. Revenge hacking can get ugly pretty quickly (criminal offence). You have a contract for X, do X and don't get paid for X. The conflict over paid for X is in a whole different ballpark than illegally using credentials for Y (taking down their site, with obvious damages as a result).

https://github.com/kleampa/not-paid

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 seems like a pretty regular phenomenon in business, that if they believe you can be walked all over, that you will, in fact, be walked all over.

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.

Being in the ongoing process of figuring out a billing arrangement that works for my tiny consulting business, I’m curious about the retainer agreement you mentioned. Does this mean you start billing a late customer lowered rate normally used for longer term work? I thought in the same direction before, seems to make a lot of sense.

No retainer: I do X hours work, I bill you for Y

Retainer: Pay us Z up front. I do X hours work. Y is deducted out of retainer Z, which then must be replenished before more work. Basically a pay up front method.

Ah I see. I thought it was “pay X per month/week, work or no work, and some hours are included in X”. Then the longer the client delays, the bigger bill accumulates as a penalty for not paying on time. I guess it’s more of a “lost post-payment trust on future projects” kind of thing here.

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