Nice job! As a US-based consultant, I've found it's always best if you immediately suggest a contract. This way you can ensure it starts with terms favorable for you.
I've also found it's pedagogically helpful to have two versions of each contract, a consultant-favored and consultee-favored. This way you can understand how each clause may be tweaked to benefit each party. For example, this book does this (US-based): https://www.amazon.com/Consultant-Independent-Contractor-Agr...
(In the US), right when I was out of college, an entrepreneur tried to hire me as a consultant to write software for a device they wanted to sell.
I started reading the contract they sent me, and it didn't make sense. It stipulated that I carry liability insurance, which doesn't make any sense when writing software.
I decided to Google a phrase or two out of the contract, and I found nolo's ("No Lawyer's") template contract for hiring a contractor to do work on a home.
I decided the guy wasn't savvy enough to work for and thus I walked away.
As a freelancer I consider contracts little more than good intentions on client side, especially as soon as you cross borders.
As an European I ain't bothering suing you in the US over few thousands of $, a lawyer would be more expensive than letting it go.
On the other hand I take my obligations quite seriously.
Have to say, never had one bad experience in my life, worst that happened was getting paid 10/14 days late.
Getting customers that mean business is the hardest part, lunatics think I am applying for a full time position and making me go through 2/3 rounds of interviews and asking me to implement Levehnstein distance or something to do QA and write E2Es at their scaleup are out of their mind.
"IT 2022" [1] the mentioned "gold standard". The benefit is that these are in general well known in the market, so they might not require that much review from the lawyers.
These are not just for consulting, but covers also other IT related topics (depending of type of deal you decide which parts to include).
I looked at the sample:
> This contract was created using ohjelmistofriikit.fi contract template.
Very good. Consider having some kind of version information, such as a date (more human readable) git commit id (unambiguous), or just 1.0.0.
Assuming your contract becomes popular, it's easy to just see that "oh, this is the ohjelmistofriikit contract version 2" instead of reading every word.
Would love these points fulfilled:
1) See how many steps there is in total.
2) Some "info" about the boxes - for example, what does "reference rights" mean?
3) Downloadable examples to see what is being generated in the first place.
4) Dispute resolution should also have a "Other" option that allows the user to manually input a custom value.
Otherwise it seems a like a fantastic thing! And thanks for making it free!
Very well done. Since this is open source, it can be customized further to make it country specific with contributions.
What type of contract is most common with software freelancers in Finnland? In Germany we usually differentiate between getting booked by the hour or goal based contracts. I think in the last decade(s) the trend has drifted towards the former. Note that I'm probably using the wrong English terms to describe this
I’m gonna do it I’m afraid and plug my own UK based one (it is paid though): https://davzie.com/products/contracts
It’s missing another option. Contract for a date, for a set amount of hours, until a completion date.
There’s an hours version but it’s based on weekly hours, not total hours.
There’s one based on date but not taking into account hours.
This is designed only for Finland. The jurisdiction popup lists only Finnish options.
It should probably be clearer that this is only useful for Finns.
Pretty useful actually!
How does one get inbound/outbound leads for hourly or project work from companies that aren't scammers or tirekickers?
Charge by the day. Offer a 10% discount on your hourly rate to sweeten the deal.
That's very helpful! Do you have any plans to open-source this?
That’s a useful thing.
Bitkom, the leading German digital industry association, offers general terms and conditions templates (https://bitkom-consult.de/muster-agb) and a guide for service contracts: https://www.bitkom.org/sites/main/files/2021-02/praxishilfe-...