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That $50 consult call that saved me from a nightmare client
Had a guy reach out last month wanting a full rebrand for his food truck business in Austin. He kept saying he "just needed something quick" but kept adding more pages and extra revisions. A freelancer friend told me to charge a $50 discovery call before taking any project, and I thought it was a cash grab at first. Turns out the guy spent the whole call arguing about pricing and asking me to work for exposure. I dodged that bullet, but now I'm wondering how many other people skip that step and get burned. Has anyone else had a small fee filter out the worst clients?
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reeseanderson1mo ago
Man, I gotta say I see it the other way on this one. Charging people just to talk feels like a wall before you even know if there's a fit, and half the good clients I've worked with over the years would've walked right there. The real problem was never that the call was free, it was that the guy ignored every red flag you threw at him, and you could've spotted that in ten minutes without a fee. Learn the signs instead. Cheap talk, scope creep, exposure offers, those are the tells, not whether someone pays for a chat. Save the filter for your gut, it's cheaper and it works better.
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