Cheap Clients Expect the Most

The client who wants a whole website for $500 will email you at 10pm about the shade of blue in the footer. The client paying $20,000 replies to your progress update with “looks good, thanks” and goes back to running their business.

I’ve done freelance and contract work on and off for well over a decade, and that pattern has held the entire time. The less someone pays, the more they want. More revisions, more calls, more little changes that are never little, and more scope that was never in the quote.

Back in 2014 I was picking up work on Freelancer.com and losing bid after bid to outsourcing shops offering to build entire websites for $100. It drove me up the wall. Looking back, those shops did me a favour. Anyone who picked the $100 bid was telling me exactly what they thought the work was worth, and by extension what they’d think I was worth.

The expensive client has already made up their mind about you. They got a referral, looked at your work, asked around, and decided you were worth the money before you ever sent a quote. Paying a proper rate is a form of trust. They hired someone who knows what they’re doing so they could stop thinking about the problem.

The cheap client hasn’t decided anything. They went looking for the lowest price, and the lowest price is how they see you. Every hour on the invoice looks like padding to them. Every recommendation is up for debate, because if you knew what you were doing, why were you so cheap?

Money plays into it too. When $500 is the whole budget, that $500 hurts to spend, so they want every last drop out of it. A business spending $20,000 usually has a bigger problem that needs solving and better things to do than micromanage your CSS.

I understand why people take these jobs. Work dries up, the bills don’t, and a small gig looks harmless. It’s quick money. It fills a gap. Maybe it leads to referrals. I’ve told myself all of those things.

The referrals are the worst part. Cheap clients refer you to their friends, and their friends are usually cheap too, and they’ve already been told what you charge. Your low rate stops being a one-off favour and becomes the price everyone in that circle expects. Try raising it with the third person who heard about you from the first one.

A $500 job that turns into 40 hours of back and forth is $12.50 an hour. You’d do better stacking shelves, and the shelves wouldn’t message you on a Sunday.

The hours aren’t even the biggest cost. Every hour spent arguing about a footer is an hour you didn’t spend finding the client who’d pay properly, or building something of your own. Cheap clients also take up far more room in your head than their invoice justifies.

The freelance platforms make it worse because they’re built around the race to the bottom. Upwork now charges freelancers a variable fee of up to 15% per contract, and you pay just to bid. Proposals cost between 2 and 16 Connects at 15 cents each. So you pay to compete against dozens of people undercutting each other, the winner gives a cut to the platform, and the client learns that good work costs about as much as a nice dinner. Freelancer.com still takes 10% of every project, or $5, whichever is more.

You can usually spot these people early. They lead with the budget before they’ve explained the problem. They ask for a discount before you’ve quoted. They tell you it should be easy, or that their nephew could do it but he’s busy with school. They want free mockups so they can see if they like your style, which is spec work, and spec work is working for nothing on the chance of working for not much.

None of those things on their own is a dealbreaker. Two or three together and I’m out.

Small budgets aren’t automatically bad, to be fair. A small business with $1,500 to its name that says so upfront, asks what you can do with it, listens to the advice and pays on time is a great client. What sinks a job is how someone treats your time and experience, and you’ll find people who respect both at every budget.

The ones to avoid are the people who want the $20,000 result for $500 and think you should be grateful for the chance. They’ll never be happy with what they get, because they never valued it in the first place, and no amount of extra effort from you changes that.

Charging properly does most of the filtering for you. When someone baulks at a fair quote, the quote did its job. You lose the job you’d have regretted taking, and you keep your evenings.

It feels terrible turning work down when things are quiet, and I still hate doing it. A slow month is easier to sit through than three months stuck with someone who thinks you’re overcharging them for every email.