

Ask HN: Freelancing for family? - scottndecker

I wrote a static site for my sister who runs a small business from her home.  Overall, it went pretty well.  We launched the site a few months back.  Then it came out that she was pretty much expecting free support afterward via the good ol&#x27; family discount.<p>Have any of you done work for family?<p>Did you give them any kind of discount?<p>How did you handle support after launch?
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yebyen
Of course, free support. I run into this all the time at work. Yeah, I am
being paid, but it happens more often than you think that someone comes asking
for something and they think you can just wave a magic wand and it's done.

Never mind they know it would have taken hours for them to do so without your
help. This happens less and less when you can educate people about how much
work it is to do a thing, exactly what goes into it, and what small things can
be done to save you (them) from wasting lots of time on unnecessary work that
may not be obviously unnecessary to them.

How much do you like your sister? Do you think she can afford to pay for
ongoing support? Is it a successful business, or more fledgling? Is what she
needs now so big, in comparison to what you've already done for free, that you
feel you have to charge for it where you didn't before?

If you built it sanely, hopefully there is a way you can show how to do what
needs to be done now. Normal people are usually afraid of making websites, and
it's not that hard. You can do your part by making good backups of what you've
already done and being available in case something goes wrong and it gets too
hairy for a novice to fix. It should not be necessary for you to be
responsible for editing copy on an ongoing basis.

Then again, depending on how hard-up you are for work...

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sogen
Oh man, honestly I always ask for payment.

And the issues: once I had a family member asking for way too much and taking
way too long to respond. I had to stop doing work with that person.

tl;dr:

1.- Avoid it as much as possible.

2.- Ask for more.

3.- Read point one.

