Client: I made a graphic using Wordle and I saved it as a jpg and now Its really bad quality. Can you make it better quality with photoshop?

Me: Uh… no. You can downsample images but not upsample and make them better quality. Does the program have export settings so that you can change the quality in options?

Client: Yeah it does but you have to pay for it so I didn’t want to.

I work freelance videography and met a potential client at a tradeshow. After many emails, lots of time in discovery phase, and writing up a proposal for the client outlining the advantages, logistics, promotional distribution ideas and a rough script, we were set to shoot a promo video. 

Client: Thank you for all the work and research you put in, but I am going to take the proposal you made and look for someone cheaper to shoot it. Sorry, but that’s just business.  

If that’s not bad enough, I got this email a few months later: 

Client: I ended up hiring my niece to do this video and I really want to pay her.   Can you please send me a quote on how much you would have charged me so I will know how much of money I should give her?

I am a freelance music videographer. I was negotiating a shoot for a few months with a client who kept going back and forth, back and forth. Eventually, all the details were hammered out. We agreed on a massively reduced budget for a one day shoot.

The client cancelled the shoot three days before the event… after I’d turned down other offers for bigger contracts on that date.

Three weeks later:

Client: Can you link me to a free internet resource that will tell me how to fix bad video? Rather than pay you as we agreed I went ahead and hired someone cheaper to film our show and I gave them your confidential quote and proposal to use as a guide. Well, they messed up the shoot and my footage is unusable.   Do you have some time next week to teach me how to fix this? We can’t afford to pay you because we spent the budget and bought a new mixer for the band.

In other words, “I’d like you to work for free to help me overcome the consequences of screwing you.”

I don’t like non-profits. I used to work for them. I worked for a couple churches then I worked for a local United Way (and if you think churches are bad, you should get me started about United Way). But this last non-profit client was the last straw.

I was doing a bunch of t-shirt designs for a fairly big non-profit. They would tell me the lettering or imagery they wanted and I would make it happen. For a while, this worked great; they wouldn’t question much and they’d pay their bills.

However, one day they shorted me on an invoice I’d sent.

Me: Hey, you didn’t pay the full amount I invoiced you. What’s up?

Client: Oh, we decided not to print one of the shirts you designed.

Me: But… you asked me to do the designs and I did them.

Client: Well, which design was it?

They didn’t even remember which designs they’d asked me for. So I found myself out of the money they invoiced me for.

Of course, I’d already completed three new designs that I needed to invoice them for, and now they’re just not talking to me. I’ve emailed, I’ve called, nothing. I even copied the president of the company in an email about the invoices and got zero response. I’m as nice as I can be with communication and pricing. I wish they’d do the same.

Thanks for giving me a space to vent a little.

Client: Hello, I need about twenty gaming videos to post for the month I’ll be absent. They need to be about 10 minutes each.

Me: That’s doable, I charge $5-$10 per video based on what’s going on, including editing.

Client: Sorry, that’s too high. My budget is only $2 per video.

Me: There’s no way I’m going to record, edit and render a video for $2. That itself is a 1-hour job right there. $10 is a bargain.

Client: You stupid liberal hipsters and your $25 jobs. Good riddance, jackass.

Good luck getting a quality 60FPS, 1080p video running 10 minutes for $2.

I work in animation. A client said this after I quoted him a price for a five-minute animation with a handful of unique characters with complex movement and interaction:

Client: I dunno… that seems like a lot. I’ll think about it.

Of course, he’d bragged about how much he makes earlier, but whatever.

Half an hour later, I heard him speaking to someone else about a project that didn’t involve me:

Client: I have a video I want to make where I wrangle a bunch of homeless people and get them to play basketball against me, and I just absolutely destroy them. Man, that would be great, I’d be willing to spend like [10X what I quoted him] to make that happen.

A close family member asked me to do some headshots for a business he was pitching to investors. I gave him the family rate, just a few hundred bucks for a half days work, did a few shots and sent him the edits the next day. He came back to me soon after saying his business partners liked the shots, but they were worried about the price.

Client: Look, just charge a little less. If this thing takes off it will be tons of work for you.

Me: Okay, fine.

Six months later they still hadn’t contacted me for work, and the product had been invested in by a major company, pulling in millions of dollars and spawning a major nation-wide ad campaign.

I’d been writing content for a small company for a few months and had done well over a hundred blog posts for them. Our relationship was pretty good, although they sometimes got pushy about deadlines.

I came to find out my mom was diagnosed with a serious medical problem and would be having a major surgery in a few weeks. I emailed the CEO and content team lead to let them know I’d need to take some time off writing but would be available again following the procedure. I wasn’t the only writer, and they had plenty of other people to work on content in my absence. Neither of them ever responded, which should have been my first clue.

A week later, in the weekly company email that I was always copied on:

Client: Finally, please remove [my name] from this email list as he’ll no longer be working with us.

Haven’t heard from him since, including when I followed up about my final payment.

I’m a freelance writer. Last week I was contacted by a massage therapist. She was doing “exotic” massage and needed “cool and shiny” introductory text to her website that would attract clients on the web.

Among her requirements was the slightest suggestion that there was the POSSIBILITY of providing sexual services.

This wasn’t really my speciality, but I gave it a shot. I drew on some old literature training and tried to solve the problem by including several passages from Catullus and Sappho for a classy kind of saucy.

While she initially liked and even accepted the text, she stiffed me on the pay, saying it failed the “trial period.” It happens, and I wasn’t even upset because she didn’t owe me much at all (it wasn’t much work). I completely forgot about it until yesterday when she wrote an angry letter:

Client: Your writing is terrible! The only customers it’s gotten me were four guys who wanted me to read them poems.

A client from an animation studio emailed me one day. I’d already had a bad experience with them once before but I was willing to give them another chance.

Client: Hi we would like a gif of Marilyn Monroe’s lips blowing a kiss, are you available for that?

Me: Yes I’d love to. What would you like the gif to look like, what are the dimensions of the gif and how long would you like it to last?

Client: Oh we’re going to leave it up to you, as long as it’s a looping gif it doesn’t matter! It’s due by Sunday. We’ll pay $100.

Despite the warning signs, I got to work on a gif of some lips blowing a kiss. I got it done in really good time and emailed them back with it in under 24 hours.

A day passed.

Me: Hi there, just wondering what you thought about the gif I’d finished for you?

A week passed.

Three weeks passed.

Me: Hi there, I was just wondering if you’d gotten my emails about the Marilyn Monroe gif project? And if we were still on for that?

Client: The gif wasn’t to our specifications and we won’t be using it.

Follow your instincts, everyone.