Freelancing - Getting paid for the quote or estimate

Posted by jah on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by jah
Published on 2012-11-19T16:21:59Z Indexed on 2012/11/19 17:19 UTC
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freelancing

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estimation

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payment

It is often necessary to spend time designing a solution, breaking down the design into tasks and sub tasks and estimating the time it will take to complete each task in order to produce a reasonable estimate or quote for a programming task. This process can be a serious investment of time, often without any guarantee that the estimate/quote will be acceptable to the potential client and more often that not the time was 'wasted' with no hope of getting paid for it (in the event of not winning the job).

Is it the case that this is a cost of doing business and what can be done to minimise this unpaid time?

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