[rhspeer]

It costs money & time to take people to court, so jerks will under pay you like $2000 because it's not worth the time and effort to go to court over it.

Dev is not like other services in the US where we can easily put leans on property.

So yea, own the hosting, take down their site if they don't pay.

I promise you every business owner has to deal with people that don't pay their bills and will understand.

Have a low tolerance for assholes, and if you ever get a lead on a client bad mouthing their previous developers about holding their project hostage, just run.

[tomjen3]

You actually can - make it so that in the contract devs retain all copyrights until paid in full. Then you can use the DMCA, which is much cheaper and far easier than putting and enforcing a lean on a property.

That said, when you get that far in a sense you have already lost.