Can I just say that you should be very careful about describing your contracts as "Bulletproof".
There is honestly no such thing as a bulletproof contract.
Secondly, telling people that "top attorneys" drafted the contracts is meaningless. That strikes me as just pure throw away marketing speak.
There are many things to consider when drafting this type of agreement and I'm just not sure that your description of the service should give freelancers great comfort.
Just my two cents. I do love the idea and know first hand the importance of having a contract in place.
Describing a contract as "bulletproof" and drafted by "top attorneys" is likely considered puffery [1] under the law, and should be fine in my opinion.
I disagree. Puffery comes into play where things of the law are not concerned. Things like advertising, marketing, etc.
Puffery has no place in the practice of law or -in this case- legal document drafting.
The courts take a dim view of this sort of thing where people might detrimentally rely on this explicit promise that Bonsai's contracts are "Bulletproof".
"1.5 Invoices. The Developer will invoice the Client for work done weekly. The Client agrees to pay the amount owed within 21 days of receiving the invoice. Payment after that date will incur a late fee of 5% ."
Fee being yearly or monthly? When setting up the variables it was displayed as monthly - but this is not conveyed anywhere in the contract which will default to the Clients best interest (yearly).
A one-time fee incentives them to not pay late, but once they are already late, there is no more incentive since they have already incurred the 5% fee.
You just quote high enough that the "discounted" rate is the real rate and the not "discounted" rate is the penalty rate. Then you're just rephrasing things (discount vs. penalty) to put a better spin on it.
According to their FAQ page the contract templates/UI are free, with their business model being based on their escrow services - which are not being offered publicly yet.
I believe that its going to take them quite some time to start offering escrow services, due to the strict escrow regulation and the (very high!) costs associated with that. My bet is that they won't offer it until after raising their Series A.
Indeed, escrow is highly regulated in some states, including CA. There are a few third party services that provide an API for escrow among other things: http://www.armorpayments.com/ and http://promisepay.com/.
Stripe and Braintree can also support some versions of escrow, depending on how long you want to hold the money for and the amount.
One of the makers of Bonsai here. Thanks for checking us out!
- Agree re email. Reason we did that is we realized most people don't have the need to create a contract immediately, and unless they bookmark us, they may not remember "that cool website that does my contracts for me..." Providing the sample contract + other relevant educational material in the meantime to stay top of mind was the best short term way to do that.
- Regarding transaction fee, right now we're really only looking at escrow, which depending on the transaction size and deal we're able to get from the third party escrow provider, it should be somewhere around 2-5%.
Re: email
I did the opposite. I was ready to view it now, but waiting for an email turned me off. So I tweeted it instead and hope I remember to go back to my tweet. And, there's a part of me that says, in a nice way, "you haven't earned my email yet."
Still, I love the idea and actually want to find a reason to use it.
Thanks for this. It couldn't have been more timely!
No kidding, I have my first meeting with a potential client in an hour, and last night I was thinking in my head "How do I even talk about guaranteeing payment?" and then I see this when I woke up.
I see what you did there. You might be able to a/b test what's converting better because you might loose some people entirely because they don't want to give away their email without first seeing a sample and then forget about it anyway. Thanks for the info about the fee, I definitely bookmarked your service for later use ;).
I've always liked the Elance / Freelancer escrow systems, in principal, and I use them when buying services. But those sites have way too much of a low-end feel for me to ask my own clients to pay me via those, for 5 or 6-figure jobs.
If this can be a high-end equivalent of those low-end escrow services, that will be nice.
Skimming over the title and the URL, I was hoping to find a Bonsai care/maintenance contractor network.
How do you reach your target audience with a company name and URL like yours?
Could you provide a sample contract without the need to enter a valid E-Mail address?
Looks interesting. I live in Canada and have contractors worldwide. I suspect this is a typical case.
I don't really care about contracts but escrow would be useful. I mean, I don't care about a formal legally binding contract that covers canada-Indonesia, phillipines, UK, etc. that would be complicated. But having a secure way to pay outside of elance/up work would be nice.
Also, when I click "let us know" it opens the mail app on my iPhone. I haven't set that up. You would have better luck if the email was also displayed.
I recently open sourced my legal docs on Google Docs, so people could share docs, ask questions, and help each other. Legal docs are expensive and the language is very obscure. Let's utilize our legal experience and help each other out. Here's my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10100848
The sample contract is well drafted and the plain English style is refreshing. The only bit of residual legalese is the bit before the signature blocks: "THE PARTIES HERETO AGREE TO THE FOREGOING AS EVIDENCED BY THEIR SIGNATURES BELOW."
It's as if the drafters, after taking great pains to make the contract clear and straightforward, decided "well we better put some magic words in there or people won't think this is a binding contract!"
Really? I'm confused by the sample contract. Section 1.3 seems to be in direct conflict with itself and also in conflict with Section 1.5.
1.3 Payment. The Client will pay the Designer a flat fee of $10,000 once the work is finished. Of this, the Client will pay the Designer $2,500 before work begins.
1.5 Invoices. The Designer will invoice the Client for work done monthly. The Client agrees to pay the amount owed within 15 days of receiving the invoice. Payment after that date will incur a late fee of 2% per month on the outstanding amount.
Can I just say that you should be very careful about describing your contracts as "Bulletproof".
There is honestly no such thing as a bulletproof contract.
Secondly, telling people that "top attorneys" drafted the contracts is meaningless. That strikes me as just pure throw away marketing speak.
There are many things to consider when drafting this type of agreement and I'm just not sure that your description of the service should give freelancers great comfort.
Just my two cents. I do love the idea and know first hand the importance of having a contract in place.