0$ clients insisting in working with milestones

[dan1307]

So, i wanted to know what is your view about this. 

Lately there are many clients that have never worked on upwork (0$ invested and 0 reviews). They are making offers that includes a low priced first milestone (50$, 75$) instead of a single final payment. I took 2 such projects. After the first draft (which was enough for their purpose i guess) they would dissapear. In the past it has never happened to me on upwork.

I just received a 3rd offer of this type today. We agreed that the project would cost 250$ (100 modeling and 150 a single rendering, and only 1 unpayed revision.) Without talking about it, the client put a 75$ milestone. It is really hard to deliver just 75$ work since we have just 1 revision, and i lost the trust in clients. 

So my question is:

Do you guys happend to go through same thing? Did the client dissapear after first milestone?

Also a question for upwork stuff. Is it so hard to avoid scamming on upwork? Why isn't it neccesarry to provide an id at least to be able to ban such clients making multiple accounts?

Thank you!

[JoanneP · Accepted solution]

Hi Dan,

I understand that there are times when clients become unresponsive after you submit your first milestone. There are several reasons for clients to become unresponsive: they may be preoccupied with other projects, with personal activities, or possibly have decided to complete their project differently. 

You must submit your work for review when working on Fixed Price contracts. To submit your work for review:

1. Go to the My Jobs dashboard
2. Find the contact you wish to submit a deliverable on
3. Click Submit Work for Payment

Once you submit your work, your client has 14 days to review and either approve the milestone or ask for changes. If they approve, the funds in escrow will be released to your pending payments. If your client takes no action for 14 days, the funds are automatically released to your pending payments and will be released to you after a 5-day security hold.

Please know that you can discuss with your client how much they should fund every milestone. You can also inform them that the submitted work is for the funded milestone. If additional work is required, they can fund another milestone for it. 

You may also check out this course for more tips on how to avoid questionable jobs. Also, please use the flag option found on each job post or message anytime you’d like to report a violation.

[ashrafkhan81]

In my opinion, having multiple milestones is a good thing. You should always try to have at least two milestones. The problem with you seems to be you are over-delivering for the funded milestone. 

When you split the project into multiple milestones, you work only to cover the funded milestone. In your case, if he funded $75 and the agreed price for modeling was $100, you should have delivered only 75% of the modeling work without rendering ...I know in some situations it may be difficult to split the work if that is the case you should ask the client to fund the part you can deliver ...if the modeling cannot be split you should ask him to fund entire allocated budget for that part if they do not agree you should not accept the contract. 

And to answer your question, no it has never happened to me. I almost always work on hourly contracts and in the past the fixed fee projects I worked I was lucky to have honest clients. 

[tlsanders]

There is never a reason for a complete draft to be a separate milestone. Revisions are built in to the milestone process, so if you're finishing a draft of the whole assignment, that's one milestone--if the client needs revisions, they have 14 days to request them before you get paid.

[dan1307]

Thanks all for answering! I think my problem was, maybe still is about having too much trust and over delivering. I started adding watermarks on the images too.