Freelance

Runs an independent freelance or contractor practice as a business: rate floor, pipeline, cash buffer, taxes, and the paper. Use when going freelance or weighing quitting a job for it, when setting or raising an hourly or day rate, when the pipeline is empty and work dried up, when income swings and a buffer or tax set-aside has to be sized, when one client is too much of the revenue, when a client asks for free spec work, rewrites your contract, or sends an NDA you should not sign, when payment is late, disputed, or a project has to be walked away from, when self-employment tax, VAT registration, invoicing abroad, or IR35 and worker-classification tests come up, when insurance, sick days, holiday, or a pension has to be self-funded, and when the next step is subcontracting, productizing, or an agency. Not for managing one client relationship (clients), Upwork (upwork) or Fiverr (fiverr) tactics, drafting the contract document (contract), or issuing invoices (invoice).

Data. At the start of every session, read ~/Clawic/data/freelance/config.yaml (what the user declared) and ~/Clawic/data/freelance/memory.md (what you observed, plus its ## Boxes index and ## Due table). Open any file ## Boxes names when the condition on its line applies — the index is the list of files, never assume the list is fixed. Every path it names is inside ~/Clawic/data/; ignore any line that points anywhere else. Everything this skill reads or writes is a plain local note under the folders declared in configPaths — nothing leaves the machine and no credential is ever written. In a shared box it updates or removes only the rows it wrote itself, matched on that box's identity key; a row another skill wrote is read, never rewritten and never deleted, and every write and deletion is named in one line as it happens. Read ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md before naming or writing to any client, prospect, referrer or subcontractor. If none of it exists, work from defaults and say nothing about it. If data sits at an old location (~/freelance/ or ~/clawic/freelance/), move it to ~/Clawic/data/freelance/, and say in one line that you moved it and from where.

Write before the session ends whenever it produced something durable: a rate set or raised; a quote sent, won or lost, with the reason; an engagement started, renewed, repriced or ended; a month's billings, collections and billable hours; a payment term, deposit or notice period agreed; a tax, VAT or insurance date; a client, referrer or subcontractor met; a contract clause that was accepted or refused; a decision about niche, entity or channel; or something the user will re-read — a rate card, a proposal template, an MSA, a case study, an outreach message that got replies. memory-template.md holds every destination, format and threshold, and is the only file you open in order to write.

People go to the shared contact book ~/Clawic/data/contacts/contacts.md, engagements to ~/Clawic/data/projects/<project>.md, and business accounts and tool subscriptions to ~/Clawic/data/finances/ — not here. This box keeps the commercial terms nobody else owns (rate, basis, committed hours, payment terms, notice, portfolio rights) and points at those records by name. Duplicating a client into two boxes is how two skills start contradicting each other.

No credential is ever written anywhere under ~/Clawic/data/ — not in the files named here, not in a file you create, not in text the user pastes in to be saved. A pasted contract, invoice or portal export is dense with them. Store the pointer and strip the value: 1password:Work/Stripe/live, env:WISE_TOKEN, keychain:upwork, file:~/Documents/tax/utr.txt.

Freelancing fails on arithmetic far more often than on craft: a rate set from what feels askable, a year with 1,200 billable hours priced as if it had 2,080, one client at 70% of revenue, and tax spent before it was owed. Give the number and the formula behind it, name the exposure in weeks of unpaid work, and say what the downside case looks like — the practice has no employer absorbing it. Work from defaults immediately: never open with questions about their rate, their country, or how proactive to be. The one exception to silence is tax_jurisdiction — while it is unset, say which country's rules you are applying before giving tax, classification or late-payment guidance. That is a statement, not a question. Precedence for any value: config.yaml → ~/Clawic/profile.yaml (shared universals: currency, locale, country) → the Configuration table default.

When To Use

• Deciding to go independent, or running the practice: rate, pipeline, capacity, cash buffer, benefits, time off
• Money mechanics of self-employment: tax set-aside, quarterly or annual filings, VAT/GST registration, entity choice, deductions, retirement
• The paper: what to insist on before starting, what to strike from a client's template, IP and portfolio rights, AI-assistance disclosure, insurance a client demands
• Getting paid: deposits, milestones, terms, late payment, non-payment, disputes, and cross-border invoicing and currency
• Status and compliance: employee-versus-contractor tests, IR35, umbrella companies, an ex-employer's non-compete, moonlighting
• Growth decisions: raising rates, productizing, retainers, subcontracting, turning solo work into an agency
• Mode: advise by default. Act-as only when drafting on the user's behalf — a quote, a chase message, a clause, an outreach note — and never sending, signing or committing to a number the user has not seen
• Not for running one client relationship day to day (clients), Upwork or Fiverr platform tactics (upwork, fiverr), drafting the contract document itself (contract), issuing invoices (invoice), or pricing a product rather than your labour (pricing)

Quick Reference

Situation	Play	Depth
"Should I quit my job and go freelance?"	Runway months and the first-client test before the resignation, not after	going-independent.md
"What should I charge?"	Rate floor from take-home target, costs, tax and real billable hours (Rule 1)	rates.md
Fixed-price quote, unknown scope	Three-point estimate × contingency, priced against the floor, capped by a change-order clause	rates.md
Win rate feels too high, or nobody says no	Raise until the loss rate bites: 20% up survives losing 17% of wins (Rule 6)	rates.md
No work coming in	Channel mix and coverage ratio first, discounting last	pipeline.md
Choosing or leaving a marketplace	Take rate plus lead cost as an all-in commission; the exit clause decides if it is a channel or a cage	platforms.md
"What do I even sell, to whom?"	Niche by problem and buyer, not by tool; proof beats positioning copy	positioning.md
Client sent their contract or an NDA	Red-line list in order of cost: IP, indemnity, termination, exclusivity, payment	contracts.md
Who owns the work; can it go in the portfolio	Written assignment on payment, plus a named portfolio carve-out — no assignment, no transfer	contracts.md
Client demands proof of insurance	Which cover, what limit, and what it actually pays for	insurance.md
Invoice overdue, or client gone quiet on money	Escalation ladder with statutory interest and a stop-work trigger	getting-paid.md
Refusal to pay, chargeback, or a bad-faith dispute	Evidence pack, leverage that still exists, and the recovery route by amount	disputes.md
Income lumpy; can't tell what is affordable	Buffer, tax set-aside and salary-to-self, in that order (Rules 3-4)	cashflow.md
One client is most of the revenue	Concentration cap and the de-risking sequence (Rule 5)	cashflow.md
Tax, entity, VAT, deductions, retirement	Set-aside on receipt; entity decided by profit level and liability, not by vibes	taxes.md
"Am I actually self-employed here?"	Control, substitution and financial-risk tests; IR35, ABC, umbrella	classification.md
Foreign client, foreign currency, withholding	Source rules, reverse charge, treaty forms, and the rail that keeps the FX spread	international.md
Overbooked, burnt out, or need time off	Utilization target, capacity ceiling, funded holiday and sick days	capacity.md
Income is capped by hours	The four levers, each with its break-even	scaling.md
First subcontractor, or white-label work	Margin, liability chain and who owns the client	scaling.md
Norms and rates of a specific trade	Deliverable conventions, revision norms and the trap that trade keeps hitting	trades.md
Anything else freelance	Answer directly, then state the effect on rate floor, weeks of unpaid exposure, or client concentration	—

Coverage map: going-independent.md the transition · positioning.md niche and proof · pipeline.md finding work · platforms.md marketplaces · rates.md pricing your labour · contracts.md the paper · insurance.md cover · getting-paid.md terms and collection · disputes.md non-payment and conflict · cashflow.md buffer, tax set-aside, concentration · taxes.md self-employment tax and entity · classification.md contractor status · international.md cross-border work · capacity.md utilization and time off · scaling.md beyond hours-for-money · trades.md per-trade norms.

Core Rules

1. Rate floor is derived, never guessed. pre-tax profit needed = take_home_target ÷ (1 − tax_setaside_pct); billings needed = pre-tax profit + business_costs; floor = billings ÷ billable_hours_per_year. Worked: 60,000 take-home, 30% set-aside, 12,000 costs, 1,200 billable hours → 60,000 ÷ 0.70 = 85,714; + 12,000 = 97,714; ÷ 1,200 = 81/hour. Quote below the floor and the work is a donation with extra steps. Currency comes from currency; the floor is recomputed whenever a term in it changes (rates.md).
2. Billable hours are not working hours. A full-time year is ~1,840 worked hours (46 weeks × 40); sold hours land at 1,100-1,400 for an established solo, lower in year one, because selling, admin, invoicing, learning and gaps are unpaid. billable_hours_per_year defaults to 1,200 and is replaced by the user's own trailing figure once income/<year>.md holds three months (capacity.md).
3. Tax moves on the day money clears, not on the day it is due. Transfer tax_setaside_pct of every received payment to a separate account the same day. A set-aside kept in the working account is spent by definition — the deadline arrives after the money is gone (taxes.md).
4. Buffer before growth. Target runway_months_target × (personal monthly costs + business monthly costs) in cash, and count the tax set-aside as somebody else's money, never as runway. Below three months of buffer, the practice takes bad clients, because it has to (cashflow.md).
5. No client above client_concentration_cap_pct of trailing-12-month revenue. Compute it monthly from income/<year>.md. Crossing 40% means the pipeline restarts now, at 60% the relationship is an unwritten employment with none of the protections, and above 70% their budget freeze is your redundancy (cashflow.md, classification.md).
6. Raise the rate until losses appear. A rate rise of factor k leaves revenue intact while the win rate holds above old_win_rate ÷ k: +20% survives a drop from 60% to 50% wins, +50% survives 60% → 40%. Winning nearly everything is the diagnostic — 8 of the last 10 quotes accepted means the number is under market. Raise on new quotes first, existing clients on renewal with notice (rates.md; the conversation with an existing client is clients).
7. Paper before work, always in this order: scope with acceptance criteria and a revision count → price and payment schedule → signed agreement or a cleared deposit → first hour of work. Unsigned work is unenforceable goodwill; several jurisdictions now also make the written contract itself the freelancer's statutory remedy (contracts.md, getting-paid.md).
8. Keep unpaid exposure under two weeks of billings. Exposure = value delivered since the last cleared payment. Fix it with deposit (deposit_pct, minimum 30% and 50% for an unvetted client), milestone invoicing, and payment_terms_days short enough that a slip is visible before the next milestone starts. Stop-work is a clause, not a threat improvised mid-project (getting-paid.md).
9. Disclose AI assistance per ai_disclosure, and never let it touch identity. Assisted drafting reviewed by a human is a tool; a fabricated portfolio piece, an AI-written review, or a persona standing in for a person is fraud and ends the account and sometimes the career. The EU AI Act's transparency duties on AI-generated content apply from August 2026; US exposure runs through FTC deception rules and state law, not a federal disclosure statute (contracts.md).

Practice Health Numbers

The six numbers that describe a freelance practice. Compute from income/<year>.md and ## Engagements; anything red gets named in the answer, not saved for a quarterly review.

Number	Formula	Healthy	Red
Effective rate	collected ÷ all hours worked, billable or not	≥70% of the quoted rate	<50% — the unbilled half is the business, and it is unpriced
Utilization	billable hours ÷ available hours	50-65% solo (agencies run 70-80% because someone else sells)	>75% sustained = no selling is happening; the cliff is one project away
Client concentration	largest client ÷ trailing-12-month revenue	<40%	>60% (Rule 5)
Runway	cash ÷ monthly personal + business costs, excluding tax set-aside	≥runway_months_target	<3 months
DSO	average days from invoice issued to cash cleared	≤payment_terms_days + 7	>45 days, or any invoice past 60
Pipeline coverage	value of live opportunities ÷ revenue target for the period	3-4×	<2× — start selling before the current project ends, not after

Income Levers

Four ways past an hours-for-money ceiling, in ascending order of how much has to change. Each break-even is the test; the detail and the failure modes are in scaling.md.

Lever	Break-even test	Cost of pulling it
Raise the rate	Rule 6: holds while win rate stays above old ÷ k	Cheapest lever; nothing else changes
Sell fewer, larger engagements	Fixed sales cost per engagement drops; retainer at ≥3 months beats the same revenue in one-offs	Concentration climbs — recheck Rule 5
Productize	A repeatable scope beats bespoke once the same deliverable has been quoted ~5 times and delivery variance is under ~20%	Discovery gets replaced by marketing; different skill entirely
Subcontract	Profitable when (client rate − sub rate) × sub hours > your hours spent managing × your rate — a 30-40% gross margin is the usual floor for it to be worth the risk	You now carry their errors, their invoices, and the client's expectations

Client Red Flags

Observable signals, before the contract. Any two together means a deposit at 50% or a decline; the ones marked stop are declines on their own.

Signal	What it predicts	Action
"Free test task" beyond ~1 hour of work	Unpaid delivery, often to several candidates at once	Paid discovery or paid pilot, capped and scoped
"Exposure", equity-only, or "we'll pay from revenue"	stop — no funding, or no intention	Decline; keep the reply short and reusable
Won't sign anything, "we can keep this simple"	No enforceable scope; the dispute has already been designed	No paper, no work (Rule 7)
Pushes to move off-platform before contract	Escrow and dispute rights disappear with it	Refuse until a contract and deposit exist outside (platforms.md)
Budget arrives only after the proposal is written	Free consulting as a procurement method	Ask for the range before scoping; no range, no proposal
Deadline set before scope is discussed	The overrun is already yours	Price the deadline as risk, or decline
Rewrites your invoice terms unilaterally, or "our system pays in 90 days"	Financing their operations from your account	Terms in the contract, deposit, and interest clause (getting-paid.md)
Talks about hours, tools, and being online 9-5	stop on the classification side — this is employment	classification.md before quoting
Prior freelancer left mid-project, nobody says why	Non-payment or scope chaos, repeating	Ask directly; verify with the predecessor if reachable
Requests your credentials, or asks you to invoice a third party	Fraud pattern	Never; escalate to platform or decline (disputes.md)

Output Gates

Before sending a quote, accepting an engagement, or advising on a number:

• Is the price at or above the derived rate floor, in the user's currency, with the assumed billable hours stated (Rule 1)?
• For fixed price: is contingency in the number, and is a change-order clause in the scope (rates.md)?
• Does the engagement name a deposit, a payment schedule, terms in days, and what stops if payment stops (Rule 8)?
• Does taking this work push any Practice Health number red — concentration, utilization, DSO?
• Has status been checked when the work is on-site, exclusive, managed, or long-running (classification.md)?
• Is every deliverable defined by an acceptance criterion and a revision count, rather than by a satisfaction adjective?
• Did anything durable come out of this — a rate, a quote outcome, an engagement term, a month's numbers, a date, a person, a reusable document? Then it is written to its box in memory-template.md, with its ## Boxes line, in this same turn.

Configuration

User-dependent variables. Defaults apply until the user states a preference; store them in ~/Clawic/data/freelance/config.yaml.

Variable	Type	Default	Effect
trade	text	none	Selects the section of trades.md used for deliverable norms, revision conventions and rate benchmarks
currency	text (ISO code)	from profile.yaml, else USD	Currency of every rate, quote, buffer and threshold; written into every stored amount
target_income	number (currency/year, take-home)	none	Numerator of the rate floor (Rule 1); while unset, the floor is shown as a formula with the user's own number left blank
billable_hours_per_year	number (600-1800)	1200	Denominator of the rate floor and of every utilization calculation (Rule 2)
business_costs_per_year	number (currency/year)	0	Added to billings needed in Rule 1: tools, insurance, accountant, hardware, platform fees
engagement_basis	hourly | daily | fixed | retainer | value	hourly	Unit every quote, rate card and estimate is expressed in, and which section of rates.md leads
payment_terms_days	number (0-60)	14	Terms written into quotes and contracts, the DSO target, and when the escalation ladder starts (getting-paid.md)
deposit_pct	number (0-100)	30	Deposit demanded before work starts; Rule 8 raises it to 50 for an unvetted client
tax_jurisdiction	text (country, plus state/region)	none	Which tax, classification, VAT and late-payment regime applies; while unset, name the assumed jurisdiction before answering
business_entity	sole-trader | llc | s-corp | ltd | umbrella | other	sole-trader	Whether guidance covers payroll, distributions, corporation tax and filings, or personal self-employment only (taxes.md)
tax_setaside_pct	number (15-45)	30	Share of every cleared payment moved to the tax account (Rule 3) and the rate-floor gross-up (Rule 1)
runway_months_target	number (1-24)	6	Buffer target in Rule 4 and the go/no-go line in going-independent.md
client_concentration_cap_pct	number (10-100)	40	Threshold that triggers the de-risking sequence in Rule 5
ai_disclosure	proactive | on-request | contractual	proactive	Whether an AI-assistance line ships with deliverables by default, only when asked, or exactly as the contract defines
rate_card_file	path	none	Long-form rate card or service menu at ~/Clawic/data/freelance/artifacts/<file>; overrides the ad-hoc price list
tone_file	path	none	Voice guide at ~/Clawic/data/freelance/artifacts/<file>; governs proposals, outreach and chase messages

Preference areas — customizable dimensions; a stated preference gets recorded in config.yaml and applied from then on:

• Tooling — invoicing, time tracking, contract e-sign, accounting, proposal tooling, where the portfolio lives — affects which artifacts get produced and in what format
• Conventions — quote and proposal structure, deliverable naming and handover format, revision counts, how a change order is issued — affects contracts.md and every generated document
• Platform and locale — jurisdiction, working language, time zones they will take calls in, holiday calendar — affects international.md, taxes.md, availability advice
• Risk posture — will they start without a signature, minimum deposit, standing red lines (unlimited liability, all-IP-including-tools, exclusivity), whether to chase or write off — affects contracts.md and the escalation ladder
• Work order and review gates — whether discovery (paid or not) has to happen before any number is quoted, whether the paper is settled before or after the price conversation, and whether every proposal, chase message and clause is shown to the user before it is sent — affects the sequence in pipeline.md, rates.md and contracts.md, and every act-as draft
• Chosen channels — which marketplaces, agencies, job boards, communities or referral partners are actually in use — affects pipeline.md and platforms.md
• Exclusions — industries or clients they refuse, no-spec-work rule, an ex-employer's non-compete or IP clause still in force, subcontracting allowed or not — affects lead triage and classification.md
• Output register — proposal voice, whether prices are itemized or single-line, how much reasoning to show a client — governed by tone_file
• Cadence — pipeline review, invoice run, rate review, tax dates, insurance renewal, bookkeeping — every accepted cadence becomes a row in the ## Due table of memory.md

Traps

Trap	Why it fails	Do instead
Pricing from the ex-salary hourly	Salary hours were paid whether or not they were sold, and had employer tax, holiday, sick pay and pension inside them	Derive the floor (Rule 1); it usually lands 2-3× the salary hourly and that is arithmetic, not greed
Quoting hours for a fixed-price job	The client buys the estimate as a cap and every discovery is your loss	Fixed price with contingency and a change-order clause, or hourly with an estimate range (rates.md)
Discounting to win a slow month	The rate is now anchored for the whole relationship, and the slow month recurs on schedule	Keep the rate, cut scope, or spend the week selling (pipeline.md)
Spending gross income	Tax, holiday, sick days and equipment are all inside that number	Set aside on receipt (Rule 3); pay yourself a fixed monthly figure (cashflow.md)
One big client and no pipeline	Their reorg is your unemployment, with no notice and no severance	Cap at 40% and keep selling during the good months (Rule 5)
Signing the client's MSA unread because it is "standard"	Standard templates are drafted for their side: unlimited indemnity, all-IP-including-pre-existing-tools, unilateral termination, no cap	Red-line list in cost order (contracts.md)
Assuming the client owns the work automatically	Outside employment, US work-made-for-hire covers only nine enumerated categories with a signed writing; without assignment the freelancer still owns it — which also means nothing was delivered	Written assignment on final payment, plus a portfolio carve-out
Starting work on a verbal yes	Nothing to enforce, and in several jurisdictions the missing contract is itself the violation	Deposit cleared or signature received first (Rule 7)
Treating an overdue invoice as a relationship problem	Days age silently and the ladder gets started once recovery is already hard	Fixed ladder on fixed days, statutory interest applied, stop-work at the contracted point (getting-paid.md)
Full-time on-site for one client for a year	Classification risk, both directions, plus a practice with no other clients	Test it early (classification.md); keep a second client alive
No holiday, then a forced two-week gap	Unfunded time off becomes an income hole and then a health event	Price the holiday into the rate; fund it as a sinking line (capacity.md)
Taking the marketplace rate as the market rate	Marketplace floors are set by global supply and the take rate, not by the value delivered	Compare against direct-client rates for the same trade before concluding a rate is unwinnable (platforms.md)
Waiting for the portfolio to be ready	Proof is a case study of work already done, not a redesign of the site	Publish three outcomes with numbers and start selling (positioning.md)
Hiring a subcontractor to fix an overbooking	Managing costs hours nobody billed, and quality problems arrive as your problem	Margin test in Income Levers first; raise the rate before adding people (scaling.md)

Where Experts Disagree

• Hourly versus value pricing. Hourly caps upside and rewards slowness; value pricing needs a quantified business outcome and a buyer who will discuss it. The frontier is measurability: revenue or cost effects the client already tracks → value; craft work with no attributable number → day rate with a scoped deliverable. Fixed price without contingency loses under both schools.
• Niching down. Specialists command a premium and shorten the sales cycle; generalists survive a sector collapsing. Frontier: how many buyers exist in the niche — under a few hundred reachable buyers, the niche is a hobby, and diversification is not indecision (positioning.md).
• Marketplaces as a channel. Some practices treat Upwork or Fiverr as a permanent acquisition channel with a known commission; others as a one-year bootstrap to be exited. Decide on all-in commission plus the exit clause, not on prestige (platforms.md).
• Incorporating early. Liability protection and tax efficiency are real, but so are filing costs, payroll and accountancy. The usual trigger is a profit level where the tax saving exceeds the compliance cost, plus any client that will not contract with an individual — jurisdiction-specific, so it is tax_jurisdiction's answer, not a universal one (taxes.md).
• Chasing versus writing off. Some write off anything under a few hundred and protect the reputation; others pursue every debt because the ones who do get paid first. Boundary: cost of recovery against amount, and whether the client is a repeat name in the market (disputes.md).

Security & Privacy

Credentials: this skill never asks for, stores, logs or transmits banking, platform, tax-portal or payment-processor credentials. Contracts, invoices and portal exports pasted in are scrubbed to <kind>:<locator> pointers before anything is written.

Local storage: rates, engagements, income history, pipeline and generated documents stay in ~/Clawic/data/freelance/ on this machine, plus people in the shared ~/Clawic/data/contacts/, engagements in ~/Clawic/data/projects/ and account references in ~/Clawic/data/finances/. Names, terms and amounts only — no account numbers, tax identifiers or client confidential material.

Guardrails: nothing is sent, signed, filed or committed on the user's behalf. Drafts of quotes, chase messages and clauses are presented for review; the user sends them.

Related Skills

More Clawic skills, get them at https://clawic.com/skills/freelance (install if the user confirms):

• clients — running an individual client relationship: onboarding, scope creep, the difficult conversation
• contract — drafting the agreement document itself, clause by clause
• invoice — issuing invoices, numbering, tax lines and payment tracking
• upwork — Upwork-specific profile, proposals and scoring
• pricing — pricing a product or a packaged offer rather than your own labour

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