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Bonsai: Bulletproof contracts, simple e-signing, escrow for freelancers
- burkek 11y ago"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).
- randallsquared 11y agoIs it a fee or an ongoing interest penalty? If a fee, then wouldn't it be 5% one time?
- pyre 11y agoA 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.
- mthomasb 11y agoIndeed, still exploring carrot and stick options here to get clients to pay on time. One nice idea we've come across is a trivial discount for early / on time payment (~1-3%). We've heard anecdotally that it helps!
- mrwizrd 11y agoIf only this existed for the United Kindgom. Looks like a great, accessible service.
- suhailpatel 11y agoWould love a service like this for the UK!
- flarg 11y agoYeah, but they'd need to cover what the IPSE/PCG contract template covers already; for those few occasions where a client will accept it ...
- SevereOverfl0w 11y agoLooks like they're interested in knowing about requests for other geographies! https://www.hellobonsai.com/faq https://www.hellobonsai.com/faq
- logingone 11y agoWould be great to eliminate IR35 hassles.
- kuriho 11y agoSkimming 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?
- mrestko 11y agoI always suffer the same confusion when I try to shop at amazon.com
- aft42 11y agoIn fact, I have yet to find an actual Amazon[1] on amazon.com, although I have found books about them [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazons [2] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=amazons http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
- mathgeek 11y agoThis also seems like a concern. There is already Bonsai, a hosted ElasticSearch provider, as well as other tech companies using the name.
- mintplant 11y agoFunny, from the description on the title I thought this was going to be another cryptocurrency project.
- danieltillett 11y agoIs anyone worried about the claim of being "bulletproof". This is like waiving at red flag at a lawyer.
- nxb 11y agoI'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.
- digital-rubber 11y agoHow do people expect to stand out if they all make the same kind of showcase website using bootcrap or similar. This is going to be another flower on the wall. Nonetheless, best of luck with the product.
- willyyr 11y agoThis looks quite interesting. A couple of things i would like to see are: - sample without the need to provide an email e.g. show at least one and offer more samples when email is provided - what's the pricing / cut you take from the money transferred through your service?
- nadaviv 11y agoAccording 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.
- dopeboy 11y agoI remember balancedpayments had an escrow feature. Perhaps they could use another 3rd party service to accomplish this?
- mthomasb 11y agoIndeed, 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/ http://www.armorpayments.com/ and http://promisepay.com/ 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.
- mthomasb 11y agoOne 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%.
- jbrooksuk 11y agoPlease, please support other countries such as the United Kingdom. This would be ideal for me!
- matthewmcg 11y agoThe 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!"
- stove 11y agoReally? 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.
- joelrunyon 11y agoSimilar contracting type service => http://ourdeal.com http://ourdeal.com
- graeme 11y agoLooks 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.
- bkrob 11y agoThis is my first time posting on Hacker News. 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.
- gexla 11y agoApparently they didn't run the marketing of the contracts by the attorneys. I don't know much about law, but a lawyer told me that law isn't black and white. It's gray. So, bulletproof probably goes against that.
- jqm 11y agoWell, technically the contracts may not be affected by actual bullets so.....
- michaelbuddy 11y agoBullet resistance then. Must leverage ballistics-speak when describing legal processes.
- fiberoptick 11y agoDescribing a contract as "bulletproof" and drafted by "top attorneys" is likely considered puffery [1] under the law, and should be fine in my opinion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
- bkrob 11y agoI 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".
- egusa 11y agoi just registered; great job with the user-experience. i think the team made it really easy to use.
- civilian 11y agoWhat's the transaction cost for payments? I'm a client who's just looking for a cheaper/nicer way to send payments to my freelancers.
- pan_w 11y agohttp://bit.ly/panwlegaldocs http://bit.ly/panwlegaldocs 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10100848