Show HN: A system for freelancers to be paid with 100% certainty and on time

Hi HN!

I wanted to introduce a project a couple of friends and I have been working on for the past few months.

It exists because of a simple fact: freelancers spend roughly 7.5% of their time chasing payments, and another 7.5% doing work that they won’t be paid for.

I used to manually ‘broker’ deals between freelancers and clients, meaning I would introduce parties and make sure the project got done as planned. After some trial and error I found a process that seemed to work for me, and Freelancer Protocol is just a web app enabling anyone to use this process:

1. Projects are broken down into intermediary steps - we call them milestones. A milestone has a deliverable and a price, as well as a start and end date. 2. We charge the client when each milestone starts and pay the freelancer when it ends, given the deliverable is uploaded by the deadline.

I’ve found that it keeps most of what usually goes wrong with a freelancing project from happening - namely the freelancer getting paid late or not at all, or client having to commit too much too early on.

We charge 2% for this service (by default billed to the client but the freelancer has the option to cover costs).

We do ask for a quick on-boarding call with freelancer before letting them use the web app, as it enables us to get to know our users and understand their needs better.

We'll be happy to hear any feedback you may have about the landing page or the actual product, thanks for checking it out!