Stephanie H wrote:
Hello, all,
I just had my most recent experience of putting in the time and effort to apply for an hourly job - writing the cover letter, answering all the questions, looking up and linking all my samples - only for the client to reply back that actually, they don't want to pay an hourly rate, they want to pay a per-word rate. This was a Plus client saying specifically that they wanted long-term work.
I no longer do per-word contracts for many reasons, the biggest being that I've found most clients want to include multiple non-writing tasks that are variable and make it impossible to figure out what the equivalent to your hourly rate would be.
I asked this guy if he'd consider in the future not posting a job as hourly that he never intended to be an hourly job/contract. He was actually pretty nice about my mildly confrontational message and explained that there is no way to charge a per-word rate on Upwork. I explained to him the difference between fixed-price and hourly contracts and sent him the link to the article about the differences. He explained that the issue is that he actually doesn't know or have a fixed price for the entire long-term project.
Is there a way to fix this? It wastes a lot of clients' and freelancers' time when freelancers only want to apply for hourly contracts, and clients post jobs as hourly jobs because they don't know how to post them as per-word/per-assignment jobs. I don't know if this is an issue of client education, or of tweaking the system to allow for milestone-based contracts that the client doesn't necessarily have a fixed price for, or what, but it is frustrating to repeatedly feel like I'm being bait-and-switched when I apply for hourly jobs that aren't actually hourly.
I wish I had a better answer for this, because I don't think you're going to like my response. I understand your frustration because you work a specific way. Unfortunately contracting and creating a scope of work for many of us is a fluid negotiation process. I've taken fixed rate jobs that were posted as hourly and vice versa, after I discussed with the client their specific needs. They often don't understand what the implication of fixed price or hourly means and part of my job closing the deal is working with them to figure out the best format for us both.
In your situation, if they want to work fixed price, I would determine a very specific scope of work, and make it very clear that anything outside those 500 or however many words is not included. I'm sure there are other writers and editors here that can chime in on how they deal with this issue and give you some advice on how to set it up so you can still take the gig but get your rate and not experience scope creep.
