[Lutger]

Ok, it doesn't sound that bad to me? You learned something about consulting, got paid 1600$ for one hour work, got good recommendations and now have time for another interesting opportunity.

Don't waste your time and clients money on pretending to do work that you don't. Its ethically wrong (maybe even criminal) and it sounds like you would be bored to death wasting your talent.

Don't blame the company for not wasting its money either. It did pay for the whole day and gave you good recommendations.

You could do fixed price. Or split the difference (on both sides of the estimate), which provides good incentives for both parties.

[cjbgkagh]

It took 3 months to get this first contract, I was trying to break into a new space. Shortly afterwards the government gave many millions of grants to all my potential customers in the country to spend on consulting with a brand new company that was spun out of the government so the entire potential market dried up overnight. The customers didn’t care it was free money. This spinout then tried to hire me where they correctly pointed out that there is now no alternative to working with them and gave me a low ball offer. I left the country instead.

[bluGill]

The problem is it takes typically takes days or even weeks of unpaid work to find the next paid job. If you get 6 months contracts that unpaid time is easy to deal with (and much of the unpaid work is really half an hour here easy to put in after hours while in the middle of the longer contract). Thus a 1 day job needs to pay a lot more perhour than a 6 month contract as the costs to get that contract needs to be paid from than 1 day - a fair price for a 1 day job is likely in the $20,000 range.