How to deal with clients who want free or cheap work done?

[grilady]

It's against Upwork policy to ask for free or cheap work. No big deal if it comes up during the interview, I just tell them and then usually never see them again. No loss. But I've had it several times now, where a client wants a quote for a supposedly simple job. They tell me exactly what they want me to do, I give them a price or accept their price and do the job. And once I'm done and the client is satisfied, they start adding to it, one thing after the other. And then you know what's next: Either do go along with it, hope it will end soon, sometimes it doesn't, so you just spend a day on a what started out as a two-hour job, but at least the client is happy. Or you tell them that you'll need a new contract or milestone, then they get all upset about it, ask for all of their money back and tell you it's because you did a crappy job. A couple of times I just returned their funds, but twice I opened a dispute, hoping Upwork would help me out. "Fixed price protection" should mean something I thought. But what it basically means is: Accept what the client is willing to pay or shell out almost $300 to go to arbitration. I've never been in a dispute with a reasonable client. If they were reasonable, I wouldn't be in a dispute, right? So obviously, I wasn't offered much. Is this how it should work? You play by the rules and in the end, Upwork doesn't have your back, not even if you've been a top rated freelancer for years and have made them thousands of $? That doesn't seem right. How do you handle those situations?

[petra_r]

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Mary S wrote:

That doesn't seem right. How do you handle those situations?

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To be honest, I've never had one of "those situations" but I suspect my deliverables are more easily defined and nailed down. I also bid higher on fixed rate contracts to take care of any unexpected scope creep or time wasting. Because it doesn't happen very often, when it does, I'm not upset because of the built in safety net.

The key is to be very selective who you work with, and to over-specify what is and is not included in your milestone(s). That way any requests for stuff that is not on your list of deliverables and really means significant extra work rather than a minor tweak can be met with an enthusiastic "Hey, yes, that's a great idea and I'll happily do that, the cost would be $ XX.XX, would you like to set up a new milestone for that?" 

I've never had a client ask for their money back in 280 or so contracts and the only dispute I had was a client trying to force me to keep working with them which I declined and that was the end of that.