On the freelancer side, I'd love accountability from clients to actually pay on time and include penalties when they don't 😂 Currently dealing with that now.

But also, most of my clients have talked about how they paid freelancers (sometimes $10k+) in advance and never got what they were promised. Lots of people are getting burned by freelancers who outright ghost or who don't fulfill the whole promise (or just do a really shitty job).

I'm going through the product now.

1.) There's zero context on the landing page, so anyone going there would have to know what it is already. It'd be good to have a short section explaining the product and use-case (and benefits, of course). It's jarring not having any context there. I wouldn't have used it if it weren't for your context here. So, pre-use, there's zero messaging. The greyed-out "info" button when we go to put in the deadline doesn't work/show info either, but I wouldn't rely on people clicking that button to get info.

2.) The payout distribution part tripped me up at first because I couldn't tell what it meant until I played with it a bit. It could use some more explanation. (Though it does explain a little when I pressed next when it prompted to put in the card.)

3.) I submitted and checked my email, and it showed this (in the screenshot). There's really no accountability or way to report the work was done or log it in any way. That, as a freelancer, is concerning.

Personally? As a freelancer, I wouldn't use the service, even if it's to keep me accountable to deadlines, and I would pass up a client who felt like they needed to use this service to manage me. (Though to be fair, I get my deadlines in early, so clients don't need it.)

It's the lack of reporting available and lack of accountability that raises red flags for me (as a freelancer). My concern is that it'd embolden clients to, for whatever reason, charge my card (how would they get my card if they are setting the deadline as the "customer" anyway?) if they're being petty or something. If I were still on places like Upwork or Fiverr (which is what I'm betting a lot of your "customers" (as opposed to "contractors") would come from, I would absolutely not use this and wouldn't work with someone who would use this because those are largely strangers with minimal contact and not much of a professional relationship outside that platform (if any), and a tool like this would require way too much trust from someone I wouldn't know.

And my stable clients wouldn't need this anyway because we already have regular communication channels established to where something like this would be seen as a scare tactic and I don't deal with those kinds of people anyway.

I’ve done freelance work before (rarely) and I get the problem as I’ve experienced businesses taking forever to pay me.

However, I think this idea misses the fact that freelancers can also be notoriously unreliable. My POV is that businesses simply will not agree to this kind of payment plan because they’re not interested in getting their card charged automatically for work that might not even be done correctly. Worst case? Maybe the freelancer is scamming them and isn’t delivering the work at all. Additionally, I think acting as the middleman has some challenges. Smart contract or not, it’s going to complicate things as the business will have to trust a third party in addition to the contractor they want to hire.

I think it solves the wrong problem. This type of solution should not be needed if you work with the right people.

As a freelancer you want to develop the skills to find reliable clients. As a client, you want to hire reliable freelancers. Of course that is easier said than done. That's exactly why I think this is where the real opportunity is.

I've been freelancing since 2009, when I landed on your project, I had no idea what it was all about. So to start with I would work on the landing page copy :)