[joshcrews]

I have everyone prepay me for Rails development. I think the reason it's not an issue is that they've worked with bad freelancers, and people that drop the ball, flake out, stop answering emails.

They don't want that so bad that they will prepay me because they believe I'm not going to do that to them, they really want me to do their project, and so prepayment is a non-issue.

Edit: I haven't asked for $30,000 in advance before; more like 20 hour blocks of time, or thirds of projects paid in advance

[dhimes]

OK- a deposit I fully agree with. But when I have prepaid (or paid the last installment before receiving the final code) I've been burned. In fact, a freelancer owes me some code as we speak that I will never see- but I don't really care because, surprise surprise, his code sucks too and I've someone else re-doing it.

In fact, maybe that's a better bellweather: look at samples of code. The more professional it looks, the more professional I can expect the interaction to be. Seems reasonable- what do you think?