Background: I’ve been freelancing for about 5 years now, I do Illustration and Graphic Design. The past two years I have been doing it full time and have gained a lot of clients.
So I have been working on a project with for former employer. It‘s pretty time intensive and involves redesigning all 18 labels for their product to fit new bottles. I designed the old labels a few years ago, the deadline was a little tight but I said yes because some of my close friends still work there.
I gave them a full cost estimate of the project, contract that included that I would be paid every 30 days, and hourly breakdown for each label which I estimated at 10-15 hours. I’m about halfway through the project and I’m taking about 6-8 hours per label. I’m also charging $30p/h which is far below my usual rate.
The CEOs of this company are crusty old capitalists. They sent me an email today saying my services were too expensive, despite having agreed to the budget. On top of that they are accusing me of time theft, which is insane because I am literally doing the work in half the time I expected.
Anyways, they want to have a meeting tomorrow. I’m not excited because they have previously tried to scope creep on this project several times, have me redo all their branding, told me I should use ai images and are now THREE weeks late paying me.
I’ve put a bunch of time into this already and declined other opportunities because of this project. I’m not really sure how to proceed at this point because it is turning into a nightmare situation where I’m not sure if they’re going to pay me.