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Comment by jamil7 | Hacker News Reader

Two entities entering a contractual agreement over an agreed price doesn't in anyway meet the definition of a scam so I'm not sure where you're getting that from. You sound somewhat naive on how negotiations like this often go, clients will pull all kinds of tricks to try and low-ball or scam free or below rate work out of freelancers, it's par for the course. You learn early on ways to spot them and ways to avoid them, difficult clients are often also price sensitive ones (no not always) so it's a pretty common way of getting out quickly and avoiding having an awkward discussion.

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> Two entities entering a contractual agreement over an agreed price doesn't in anyway meet the definition of a scam so I'm not sure where you're getting that from.

I'm not a lawyer, but there are documented court cases in Finland where "two entities entered a contractual agreement over an agreed price", and then later the court determined that the price was outrageous and therefore it was actually fraud. For example, a door-to-door salesman selling house renovations to elderly people for 10x prices. Now, perhaps this is not fraud in the jurisdiction where you live, but it is definitely fraud in Finland.

Where I live its context dependent.

> selling house renovations to elderly people for 10x prices

is illegal if the targets were elderly (or disabled), but not if you are just regular Joe and definitively not to business. In fact that's how politicians usually "help" their friends here, so laws are quite muddy probably on purpose

I am not a lawyer, so I can't argue on the topic of legality, but I can promise you: if you try to sell me something at 10x market price, I _will_ go around telling people you're a scammer. Then you can explain to people how you're actually not breaking any law while scamming people.

Well, there are people charging $100/h around here — do you think they are scammers because there are others that charge $10/h?

You literally can set arbitrary price to your time and at worst there won't be anyone willing to pay it.

There's a difference between setting a price in good faith that you think the market is going to accept, and setting a "f u" price that you think no reasonable person should accept.

There is no such thing as "one reasonable price". You may value your time arbitrarily high and don't need explanation for that, and there may be someone that value money arbitrarily low and has literally random reason to hire you.

This checks as long you give your rate/price upfront. This would be a scam if you DO the work and THEN charge non-market rate/price.

Let me give you example. I live in Slovenia. There are quite a few programmers here. You have some brand new guys that charge 15 or 20 EUR per hour, and then you have some SV veterans that came back (or work remote), and charge SV prices, and everything in between.

If you go for a quote for a simple android app (iPhone is not that popular here) you are quite likely to get more than 10x difference in quotes from various studios.

Perhaps using "outrageous" was hyperbole, let's say "above market" and not 10x the going rate. There's a pretty clear contextual difference between these two situations, nobody is cold calling or going door-to-door finding elderly clients and pressuring them into signing a contract, this is a B2B transaction initiated by the client.

We can nitpick on the definition of "scam" and the legality of it, but those words will not nullify the reputational outcomes that you will get if you try to scam people. Even if you are technically on the right side of the law, even if you only charge 3x market price instead of 10x, some of your "difficult clients" will be vocal about your business practices.

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