I have been back on the freelance market pretty heavy for the last year and I had an idea for a small tool product for freelancers/contract works of any type
1. What is your normal deliverable?
2. How do you deliver that to the client?
3. Do you deliver before or after payment?
4. How do you usually accept payment?
2. Email or Dropbox if there is a deliverable. Though sometimes it's via FTP.
3. Always before but only because I work with businesses. In the past I worked with individuals and I did half up front and then half on delivery.
4. PayPal, direct deposit, and international wire transfer.
1) Mostly full stack web/app development. Code for completed, tested app is the end point deliverable.
2) Give them access to my repo, push to their repo or send a zip
3) Mostly before, especially if it is a trusted client relationship.
4) Check or ACH.
I think however you are asking small scale questions that only concern you in relationships that are lacking in trust. An easy way to change the dynamic is to work on a retainer with clients. It takes some convincing but often times the conversation about it alone will help you sniff out if there is going to be issues. People who push back and say they would never work that way, are typically not good clients. People who understand the scenario and agree to it or agree with simple and logical conditions are the people you want to work with.
2. email or password-protected link to my server
3. depends, but mostly before payment, as I work w/ enterprise customers
4. unfortunately, there isn't a single way, sometimes via freshbooks (paypal), mostly check (companies may not have a paypal account, and then the fees suck).
2. Bitbucket repo check-in, and deploy to staging server for acceptance, then I also do the promotion to live. (although for one client, it's an internal TFS system)
3. Before. I invoice in arrears.
4. Bank transfer. Used to be cheque, but it's a pain, so only direct bank transfers now... Some clients are slow to pay. Between 60-90 days for a NET30 invoice...
2. push to staging/production, code repo
3. retainer only, which means they pre-buy hours in blocks of time. I work it off, and they "top-up" as needed. For project-based it is usually broken into parts (1/3 up front. 1/3 on miletstone 1, 1/3 on delivery)
4. check, ACH, paypal (sucks)
2. They get access to a git repository as well as nightly builds.
3. If the project is fixed price, then I work out a payment schedule. If I am skeptical about the client, I ask for a certain percentage up front.
4. Bank wire, paypal, check, etc.