This was a few years ago, when I didn't charge what my art is actually worth.
I had just finished a commission and only wanted five bucks for it. The client actually sent over twenty-five bucks. When I went to thank them, this exchange happened:
Me: Holy moly, that's really generous! Thank you so much!
Them: No problem. I think your art is worth it. But don't raise your rates to that; I enjoy making people thank me and you wouldn't do that if I just paid your rate.
This isn't a client from hell, not at all, but I thought you all might appreciate a story about one of the good ones.
I'm a graphic designer. A few years back a New Zealand women's parliamentary lobby group rang me up. They wanted to use an old but still relevant cartoon about workplace sexism that I'd drawn for a local magazine back in the 1970s. It would be part of a PowerPoint projection behind the keynote speaker at their annual conference.
Client: How much do you want for the one-off rights to use it?
I was baffled at first. No-one had ever asked me if they could use one of my old cartoons before. I didn't want to price myself off the market, but I didn't want to sell myself cheap either, so I told them I'd have to think about it, and asked them to call me back the next day.
Then it came to me. When they called back:
Me: Pay me whatever you like, but you have to pay the exact same amount to Rape Crisis, and email me proof that you did it.
There was an amused chuckle at the other end of the line.
Client: Done.
Easiest $350 I ever made.
I’m responsible for graphic design and website maintenance for a local church. Best client anyone could ask for, hands down. As a thank you for being awesome, I waive the design fee for their 5K fundraiser t-shirt each year.
A similar 5K fundraiser was starting up, and reached out to me to design their shirts as well.
Client: It’s a new event, so branding and a memorable logo like the one they use each year is super important.
I whip up two options and send them a draft, with a copyright notice included on the image.
Client: Great, thanks! We sent the file you gave us to the printer.
Me: Glad you like it. I’ve attached my invoice.
Client: Why is there a charge for this? You do 5K t-shirts for free.
Me: No, I don’t. If the amount I’ve invoiced isn’t in the budget right we can discuss other options.
A week later, I get a call from the client.
Client: The printer says you put a copyright on the design even though you don’t own the 5K or our logo. He needs written permission from you to print that design, so if you could just email him that would be great.
Me: Great, I’ll send that right over as soon as we discuss payment.
I ended up accepting partial payment because they were harassing the print shop, and I do too much work with those guys to be involved in problematic jobs. Somehow word of this got back to the church, and they paid the remainder of my invoice to the new client. I credited it to their account.
While reviewing our Google My Business page I noticed a bad review from a former “client.” She was a website project that one of my former employees took on as a contractor and out of charity, I picked it up to finish what he couldn’t.
Prior to the project, I had a call with the client to sort out the mess. The client had no contract with me and never paid my company any money and I made it clear that out of the goodness of my heart I was helping her out because it was so close to done.
The project essentially had to be redone as she changed her mind about everything she wanted every week. Since I had no scope or contract from the original project (and didn’t bother setting one up for my crack at it) I had to take her word for what was included and what wasn’t.
Needless to say, the project tripled in hours from what was budgeted but throughout the whole process I never got an indication she was unhappy with the work, quite the opposite. Her emails stated things like, “You rock!”, “This feature is awesome!”, “Great work!”
When it was time to launch the website I went through my normal pre-launch checklist, getting approvals from her to launch, etc. After we launched the site, she demanded we take it down as she “hadn’t looked at the site” and that we had launched it without her permission.
We quickly redirected the domain back to her old site. I told her that I can’t continue to work on the site as my paying workload can’t allow further free work and introduced her to another developer to fix and finish what she couldn’t make time to review before.
Weeks went by and I reached out and asked how things were going.
No response.
I then found the review stating we were poor communicators (we communicated by email at least three times a week), took too long (a month of that she was on vacation and said, “don’t worry about it till I get back”) and lacked professionalism and customer respect.
After following up by email to get clarification on the bad review she stated that I should have gone above and beyond her expectations so that I could have received referrals from her family and friends but now that she was going to use her experience as a Case Study of what not to do with her business students.
I just thought, “Right…because giving you triple the hours for free and a far superior product than you had before at no extra cost wasn’t going "above and beyond”