Break the project into milestones and give a tentative price for the first two or so milestones. You can quickly figure out who is a dick and who is not wrt to

Break the project into milestones and give a tentative price for the first two or so milestones. You can quickly figure out who is a dick and who is not wrt to contract employers based on how much they talk about the project, how involved they are and how bad they want it. There are people out there who fancy themselves software "owners" and are just in it for the sake of saying "my programmer .." in polite conversations. Avoid people with Big Ideas and work with people who want a problem solved. Also beware of wannabe software vendors and resellers; people who will pay you to write software they intend to resell, and not use directly. Those tend to over think it and they're swayed by the slightest shift in trends; a blog post they read somewhere can bring the project to a halt. It's good to be paid, but it's even better to know your work is being used somewhere by someone, instead of it sitting in someone's My Documents folder.