aaronogan

Rather than the complicated deal that he had proposed, I am thinking of offering a monthly retainer for three months. Any thoughts or other suggestions here?

Yes, I see your point. I have a full-time job that pays well but also consumes a lot of my time, so this is just a side-project of mine. I can't provide great turn-around time, especially while I'm at work, so I thought that this project would be a quick way to build up a client base and get my feet wet in freelance.

I agreed to $50/hr for this project. It's a community site developed in ASP.NET/C#/SQL and I'm sub-contracting, the end-client is a Fortune 500 company. They very cheaply outsourced the project and, not surprisingly, were left with some bad code.

I like your suggestions - is this something that you are already doing?

Being such a low-volume project with a choppy work schedule, I think that monthly payment option that we agreed on can work well for this project. I would like to start working on some standard agreement documents, contracts, etc, but I feel like this current project is so small and low-margin (I probably low-balled myself; that's another story) that it's not really worth the effort of putting together in such a short time frame. Do you think all of this is necessary for about $200-300 worth of work per month?

No, it was just an hourly arrangement until any project work came along, at which time we would re-evaluate.