You did the work. Now make sure you get paid.
My father worked as a freelancer, and like most freelancers, he relied on informal agreements — a verbal understanding, maybe a text. Formal contracts cost money and take time most freelancers don't have when they just want to start the job.
So the pattern repeated: work gets done, payment gets delayed or never shows up, and there's no real way to hold anyone accountable. Freelancers lose an estimated $6B a year in the US to non-payment. It's a real problem, and nobody's built proper infrastructure for it.
What it does
Pacterms sits between "nothing" and "hiring a lawyer." It's a fast way to create a legally-binding agreement, verified over SMS, plus invoicing and payment tracking tied to that agreement. If a client stops paying, Pacterms sends escalating payment demand notices automatically — and if that doesn't work, generates a court-ready complaint you can file yourself.
Features
SMS OTP-verified agreements
Invoicing linked to the agreement
Payment tracking per job
Evidence Pack — one PDF with agreement, communication, and payment history
Escalating payment notices when a client goes unpaid
Self-file court documents for small claims
Bilingual (English/Spanish)
Who it's for
Trade workers — construction, HVAC, contractors — who are especially exposed to this problem and underserved by tools built for designers and devs billing corporate clients.
Where things stand
Feature-complete, finishing SMS carrier approval and Android packaging before opening up more broadly. Built entirely with AI tools, no traditional engineering background — happy to talk about that too.
Twenty years of running a services company taught me that collections are won at the proposal stage, not the courtroom: deposits up front and progress billing tied to milestones killed 90% of our non-payment problems before they existed. The court-ready complaint is a smart backstop, but the feature I'd market hardest is the agreement itself, because trade workers who ask for 30% up front with a signed doc rarely need the escalation stack. Sell it as "get paid on time," not "sue faster."
Twenty years is a lot of receipts behind that advice appreciate you laying it out this plainly. You're right that I've been marketing the backstop instead of the thing that prevents the fire. The deposit + milestone structure is already in the product; it's just been sitting behind the escalation stuff instead of leading.
Curious! In your experience, was it the deposit itself that did the work, or the fact that it was in writing and tied to a specific milestone? Trying to figure out which part actually changes client behaviour versus which part just feels reassuring to the person sending the invoice.
Great idea! Making agreements and invoicing simple is a real pain point for freelancers and small businesses. Wishing you a successful launch! 👏
Thank you very much. :)
This is fantastic. I burned out on freelance work because of exactly this issue. I got sick and tired of exerting as much effort chasing down deadbeats, as I did trying to find new work. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. Not a great motivator to go out and find new clients just so the cycle could repeat. If I were still doing freelance work I'd sign up in a heartbeat. And prior colleagues report the problem with non-paying customers is only getting worse. I wonder if you have any plans to expand this to other professions that sometimes have to chase down deadbeat clients, such as contractors. They might hate the idea of chasing down old clients too. Just a thought.
Really appreciate you sharing this; the burnout part hits harder than any "late payment" stat I could put on a landing page. It's not really about the money owed; it's the fact that chasing it becomes a second unpaid job on top of the first one.
Curious, if a tool like this had existed back when you were freelancing, what would have made you actually trust it enough to use it on a new client?
Trying to figure out if it's the SMS confirmation, the evidence trail, or just having something in writing that would've moved the needle for you.
And yes, contractors are very much on the radar. Talked to a few HVAC and general contractor folks recently, and the "chasing deadbeat clients" language you used is almost exactly how they describe it too.
Construction/trades is probably the next vertical after freelance/gig work.
Probably the same approach that has "sold" me on other SaaS: a free trial period. Had this product been available back then, and I'd had some client that wasn't interested in paying (which I usually had one or two clients at any given time in that category), a free trial would have let me see if I could in fact "hand off" that task so that I could go do other things. It would also allow me to see how effectively the tool worked to get folks to cough up what they owed me. Another possible way that I'd use this, and I'm not sure if it's already set up for this, is to simply use this for ALL clients, so that from the get-go I don't have to worry about the billing. I'm working now with healthcare providers and I know they have a lot of the same headaches. Some of them still chase people down via collection agencies, but others are turning to services like this. That might be another "target market" for you to pursue.
Sorry for the delay; I've been heads-down building out some other features and only just got back to IndieHackers.
Really appreciate you laying this out so specifically; the free trial angle, using it as your default for all clients, and the healthcare lead are all genuinely useful.
One ask, if you're open to it: do you know anyone, in healthcare or otherwise, who'd be a good fit actually to try this out and give real feedback? Always looking for a few real users to test with before wider release, and given how clearly you've thought this through, I'd trust your read on who else might be worth reaching out to.
No pressure either way, and thanks again for taking the time.
I'm curious what you've learned from people who've actually dealt with non-payment. Was there anything about how they decide whether to pursue a client that challenged one of your original assumptions about the problem?
Honestly, the two comments right above yours taught me more about this than any of the market research I'd done. One person described burning out entirely not because collections tools failed him, but because chasing payment became as much work as the job itself, until it wasn't worth finding new clients at all. That challenged my assumption that nonpayment is a per-invoice problem; it's actually a fatigue problem, and once people cross that threshold, they don't just skip one collection; they quit freelancing.
The other comment from someone who ran a services company for 20 years challenged a different assumption. I'd been building toward "help people pursue nonpaying clients better." He pointed out that experienced operators don't really decide whether to pursue after the fact — they structure the deal (deposit + milestones), so pursuit rarely comes up. So the real decision point isn't "chase or don't chase," it's "require a deposit or don't," and that happens way earlier than I'd been designing for.
Still early days gathering these stories, but both pushed me to rethink what the product should lead with.
Appreciate the context.
Would be good to continue the conversation as you learn how these patterns shape the product.
What's the best email to reach you on?
Would love that, thank you. You can reach me at admin at thyvoxa dot com happy to keep comparing notes as this plays out.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.