If you’re interested in getting me involved in your project I’ll need detailed specs and hopefully design comps before I can evaluate if we are a good fit. I understand that you may be reluctant to spill all the beans on your project right off the bat. In that case you can give me the high level view of your project and then we can proceed to an NDA before you give me the spec/comps.

Things that I would need to know:

• What server side technology are you using?
• What date are you targeting for project completion?
• How many hours a week do you expect from me?
• Do you have a designer to handle the graphic elements of the project?

Things you should know about me:

• I try to target working 20 hours a week on average combined for all my clients. That means some weeks I don’t work at all and others I work 40.
• I usually target 1-3 days a week to focus on each client who has an active project. For example if you have a project that I’m putting in 20 hours a week on I’ll probably work two days a week all day on your project and then spread the other 4 hours around the other days as needed.
• I’m very stringent with tracking my hours. You’re paying me to work, not go walk the dog. I typically only count time spent on a project when I’m coding. Correspondence is usually free unless it starts getting out of hand and soaking up all my time. If we need to have a long conversation I may schedule it for a day that I’m going to be focused on your project. So I’m going to spend 8 hours that day and the conversation is part of those 8 hours.
• In most cases I don’t count time doing research as work. Likewise if there is some bug that turns out to be part of the Flash player or Flex framework I’m not going to count the time spent figuring it out against you. It’s not your fault that these things happen.
• Cases where I would count research are if you have a specific need that I’m unfamiliar with and I tell you up front that there will be research and testing involved. For instance, if you’re running on a .Net server and you need to exchange data between server and client using a binary connection ( AMF ) then I’m going to have to look into that. In those cases I will count 50% of my time researching to you because it’s of benefit to both of us.
• We need to have clear communication of what you expect from me up front. That’s why I want to see as detailed a spec as I can so that I can evaluate if this is a good fit for me. If I agree to work on your project I’m really agreeing to the spec. It’s to be expected that the spec will evolve over the duration of the project, which is fine. But if you come along and say something like, “Oh, and we have this old Flash animation thingy that needs to be updated, blah, blah, blah” then I might say no.  And you really don’t want to pay me my rate to spent a hours looking over some 3-year-old code that needs to be updated.