Great example of the type of client who has no understanding of the web development business model. I can't blame him though, it's not on the client to understand, it's on the service provider to educate as needed. The client did nothing wrong in this case, but that he thought these things were positive is what shows his lack of understanding. To me, these things show a lack of experience and professionalism on the part of the provider.

> The platform is built on Ruby on Rails running on MySQL and the fantastic Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon Web Services. Not too complex, but enough to challenge the average freelancer.

So, here he assumes that freelancer is on the low end of the scale of technical ability? Perhaps this is true for the freelancers he has picked up. If your freelance developer is challenged by a Rails projects which is "not too complex" then perhaps you should keep looking. A freelancer should be an expert at the services provided. Hourly rate in this case is often irrelevant, see also "10x" developer.

> Late nights spent debugging issues, 30 minute response times day or night, challenging questions about some of our design or dev decisions, a constant awareness of us being in startup mode with suggestions on affordable options to deploy various bits of tech and then two unforgettable incidents.

This isn't a freelancer, this is an employee. But it's not really an employee either, because this person doesn't get any of the perks of being an employee. Not that it really matters, I think those perks are largely imaginary anyways. Nobody really has job security.

A good freelancer has other clients and a life. Work which encroaches on that life (and elevates priority over my other client work) had better make it worth my while in terms of payments. Clearly, from the rest of this article, this isn't something the author is thinking about. For me, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease. The money wheel gets the grease and the squeaky wheel gets dropped.

> The first time I knew this was going to be a great relationship was when 'N' dialed in for our usual Monday evening call and started the conversation with "I was thinking over the weekend that a good way to optimise the user experience would be xx which would positively impact YY in the business".

See the above items about other clients and a life.

> 'N' said: "I've been thinking that the right thing to do here is give you 50% off my last bill (around $700 USD discount) given the situation. I value our relationship and I'm choosing the right thing vs the right business decision. I'm sure we'll work together again and believe in what GetViable is trying to do."

As a client, this would be a red flag. This would be the sort of thing which would make me do a face-palm. What would Steve Jobs do? ;)

Here are some bullet points to help supplement my above points.

- I'm not a freelancer, I'm a business providing a service.

- As a business owner, my job is to maximize the money coming into the door. I don't give discounts and I seek the maximum rates I feel the market can bear. If I left money on the table, I screwed up.

- If I don't own part of your business, then I'm not your partner. Reaching your expectations that we both laid out is important, beyond that, the success of your business is none of my concern. I do wish you the best of luck though.

- Don't judge me on my willingness to slave myself to your business. Judge me on the strength of my own business. If I'm successful, it's because I'm more effective than my competition. Jones and Brothers plumbing service which has been in business 40 years has been in business that long because it's run well. Joe Blow freelancer who has been in business for a year and is making the above business mistakes probably won't be around for long. Or eventually will learn from those mistakes.

- It's important to understand that my business model is different from yours. If I'm a solo developer then the money I can bring in the door for my development services is limited by the number of hours that I can work in one day. I can't scale beyond those hours. I can hire another developer, but that developer is bound by the same constraints. I have to maximize every hour that I'm working. Your business model is different. It can scale beyond the available working hours in your day. Don't expect me to discount my rates at the detriment of my business so that you can more easily bootstrap yours.

- You need to be paying your freelancers well. Money is the lifeblood of any business, even if a freelancer is acting more like a sort of plug-in employee rather than a business owner. If that lifeblood isn't flowing well, then the business is going to run into problems and ultimately that's going to affect your project.