lowtek
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lowtek,
Thank you for taking the time to respond. To answer your questions:
- Yes, all the discussion took place in Upwork chat. I put the hours estimate in the cover letter.
- Yes, it was hourly and the weekly cap was 40. After sending the post-submission messages, the weekly cap was reduced to 3.
- Yes, all these messages came after I submitted the work. I just did a search and my content is already on their site.
So they basically knowingly contracted you at a high rate with full time hours, liked the work you did well enough to post it on their site, and then decided they wanted a discount.
In my mind, them posting the work constitutes fulfillment of the contract. They don't get to come back and unilaterally renegotiate after the transaction is over. If they had been morons and just said "oops, we didn't mean to pay you so much. Let's discuss this before we post the work.", then that would be a totally different conversation, and one in which I would say it's better to just eat the loss of time and money and get the 5* review and move on with your life... but that's not what happened.
It's up to you how you want to proceed. Your position seems defensible to me, given the facts. Upwork *should* side with you on this, provided you have all the evidence in order.
Take screen shots of the chat immediately, in case they try to edit it.
Take screenshots of their site, showing they have put up your work, thus accepting it.
As far as I understand it, if they don't formally file a request for refund then the money should default to you in a couple weeks. So, you could just keep your mouth shut and collect the money and then tell them to bugger off. They'll nuke your review, which won't look great, but you'll have a chance to respond on your profile, mitigating some of the bad juju. You can always deal with that in the next few gigs you get by addressing it with new clients up front. If you do a great job, you'll get more 5* reviews and life will go on.
I had a client try to get $500 of work for free off me, and they didn't use the formal dispute system. It defaulted to me and they nuked my rating from orbit, but I recovered. I had previous 5* reviews to show I was a good freelancer, however. I just say this to show that it's possible to come back from such a crappy situation.
It depends on who you are. Are you comfortable getting negative feedback from someone who is an entitled spoiled child? Are you comfortable taking the extra time it will require to overcome that negative feedback?
If yes, tell them to get bent.
If no, then chalk it up to getting paid in brain bucks (i.e. experience) and work out a deal.
Either way, don't sweat it. In 5 years, it won't matter. Hell, in 6 months it probably won't matter.