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Not necessarily only these two options... About 10 years ago, I started working in for a small metal fabrication company who had their website done just before I joined. The boss never paid the developers' final invoice, and one day they did something similar: they replaced the front page of the website with a message saying saying something like "those people do not pay their bills".
Although I knew nothing about web development, I did have a good general IT knowledge, and used FTP before, so my boss, who paid for the hosting account, dug the details up, I logged in and realised they only renamed the index.html page and uploaded a new one. Within minutes the FTP login details were changed and the situation reverted.
I truly think there was a way for the developers to get paid before they pulled this trick, but not after. To me, although I wasn't happy with my boss not paying his bills, what they did felt wrong. Fast forward to present day, and I'm a full-time freelance web developer. In the last 7 years of me being one, I had only two customers who didn't pay their final invoices. I could have done something like that, or could have even hinted that I am able to do this, but didn't, for two reasons:
1. I pride myself in my professionalism. This is unprofessional to me and I will not stoop down to this level.
2. In the last three or four years, I didn't have to look for work at all, it all came to me via current or past customers. Therefore, my reputation is the most important asset I have, and I want all my customers, even the ones who didn't pay in full, to have nothing negative to say about me. Eventually, both customers paid in full, without me having to even make a hint of threat, so I do believe I handled things correctly. One thing I did learn is to put two clauses in my contracts:
1. That the code will be hosted on my server, and will only be released to clients' server(s) once a full payment has been made.
2. That the code is my property, regardless of the server it hosted on, until full payment has been made. The second is to cover the possibility of me releasing the code before the full payments. Even then, if I ever get to the stage where I feel that I need to take a similar action, I would rather delete the files (or some files) from the customer's server and not post anything defamatory about the customer on their website. But I find it hard to believe I will ever even go that far. |