Freelance

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/.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

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/.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/.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/.md and ## Engagements; anything red gets named in the answer, not saved for a quarterly review.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 : 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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