Terms & Conditions of my services:
1. By awarding project to me you agree to these Terms & Conditions. I believe my Terms & Conditions are fair and provide guarantees against scam to both customer and provider. I created these Terms & Conditions because of recently raised amount of scam activity here. I send these Terms & Conditions to any customer I work with.
2. Note about milestone/escrow payments. I need to add this note because of lots of confusion (especially for customers who are new here) caused by freelancer.com renaming term "escrow" to "miles tone" into their web GUI. Milestone payment isn't pre payment. After you create milestone payment the amount is locked by freelancer.com so customer cannot get it back (leaving provider w/o payment) and provider cannot get it until customer releases it. This provides guarantees to both customer and provider: customer can be sure that provider cannot receive payment before work is finished and milestone payment is released, provider can be sure that customer cannot leave him w/o payment. If project fails and provider/customer disappears without any action on the state of the project, milestone payment can be released by filing a dispute to freelancer.com staff.
3. Before starting the project all details should be clearly discussed here in PMB (unless you are willing to pay per hour - my average hourly rate is $17 USD / per hour and can vary slightly based on the complexity of work). No extra work (not specified in original project description and/or Private Message Board) will be done.
4. Before starting the project it should be divided into milestones (unless you agree to put full payment into escrow before starting any work or project is small enough to be fully finished quickly during one milestone).
5. Upon awarding the project customer has to put first milestone payment into escrow immediately. As freelancer.com takes 10% (of full project's cost) fee from providers's account immediately after project is awarded first milestone payment cannot be less than 20% of full project's cost.
6. First milestone payment is only for first part of project (first milestone of project - see #4). After first milestone is finished customer should put next part of payment into escrow (create second milestone payment) - to start work on the second part of project (see #4). This process repeats until all milestones are done to customer's satisfaction and project is fully finished.
7. All milestone payments should be released immediately after the project is finished unless we agreed about delay *BEFORE STARTING THE PROJECT* (to let customer fully test the project and make sure that it is finished to hightest standards of quality). This is not required to release any of the milestones (partial payments) before project is fully finished.
8. No work will be started w/o appropriate milestone payment (see #4). I will not tolerate any excuses like "will put milestone tomorrow", "will put milestone next week", "my bank is closed b/c of holiday". Delivery time does not include time spent waiting for milestone payment.
9. WHEN PUTTING MILESTONE PAYMENT PLEASE MAKE SURE TO ASSOCIATE IT WITH RELATED PROJECT BY SPECIFYING MILESTONE TYPE AS EITHER "Full and final payment for a completed project" OR "Partial payment for project". THIS IS REQUIRED TO BE ABLE TO START DISPUTE IN CASE OF ANY PROBLEMS - I ALREADY HAVE MILESTONE FROM PAST YEAR IN WHICH TYPE WAS SPECIFIED AS "Other reason" AND CUSTOMER DISAPPEARED IMMEDIATELY AFTER WORK WAS DELIVERIED TO HIM. FREELANCER.COM DISPUTE SYSTEM DOESN'T SUPPORT "Other reason" MILESTONES. IF YOU PUT MILESTONE OF TYPE "Other reason" IT WILL BE CANCELLED AND YOU WILL BE ASKED TO PUT MILESTONE WITH TYPE EITHER "Full and final payment for a completed project" OR "Partial payment for project" (WHICHEVER IS APPROPRIATE ACCORDING to #4).
10. YOU SHOULD NOT SELECT SEVERAL PROVIDERS FOR YOUR PROJECT. IF YOU WANT TO HIRE SEVERAL PROVIDERS FOR EACH PART OF YOUR PROJECT START SEPARATE PROJECTS FOR EACH PART. This is because providers pay 10% of full project's cost to freelancer.com as project commission.
11. *IMPORTANT*: MAKE SURE YOU DESCRIBED PROJECT CORRECTLY AND WILL NOT CHANGE PROJECT DESCRIPTION AFTER AWARDING THE PROJECT. For ex. specifing in Project Description "I need script to crawl data from web directory [login to view URL]" and then after 2 days of work asking me to "crawl data from web directory [login to view URL] instead because you already found data from [login to view URL]" is not ok because in case I agree with this change that would mean that I spent 2 days for free. I will reject this change and deliver work exactly as described in original project description. In case changes are minor and do not require significant rework I may agree to change original Project Description - BUT THIS IS ON MY SOLE DISCRETION.
12. Order of milestone payments cannot be changed w/o additional agreement. This is because milestone can depend on finishing milestones preceding it.
General Order of Actions to complete your project:
1. Clearly discuss all the details in PMB (Private Message Board).
2. Divide project into parts (milestones). For small projects there will be only 1 milestone.
3. You award project to me. You put first milestone as agreed in #2.
4. I accept project and start work on first milestone.
5. After finishing first milestone you create escrow payment for second milestone.
6. I work on second milestone.
7. Repeat #5-#6 for all the milestones in the project as discussed in #2.
8. Test final result and release all milestones.
9. Write feedback to my freelancer.com profile. If you follow these guidelines I will send excellent feedback to your freelancer.com's profile.