Need: Service Contracts

I’m doing my first huge “on the side” web design and programming job for a company up in Portland. I’m most of the way through the project at this point, and the guy running the show for the client is being a real piece of work. I’m dealing, primarily, with an old college buddy and good friend up there, but, for the most part, the project isn’t going very smooth. Between client changing his mind at the worst times, assuming I can read his inner most thoughts, putting his employees in the middle of it, etc…, it’s just been a real mess. I’ll be lucky to break even on this whole thing (because I had to sub-contract some of the back-end programming that was out of my league).

I did this because my friend that works there said his boss was riding him about it, so asked if I could help them out. It was more of a handshake deal, because I had the confidence from my friend that things would work out fine. Neither he, or I, expected the mess to come out like it did, and because it was more of a handshake kind of deal with just vaguely written service agreements, I’m getting bitten in the backside.

So here’s where you guys come in. I know a great deal of you out there are Web programmers, services providers, consultants, designers, etc… . I’d appreciate it greatly if you could send me a sample contract that you use for these types of things. I’d also be interested in getting contracts from folks who do systems and IT services (building and repairing computers, networks, etc…) as I do that quite a bit, too (it’s much easier, as many of those folks are local). If you could e-mail them to me at jake [at] utterly boring [dot] [com] that’d be just dandy. Thanks again for your help, everybody.

(And yes, I know there are sample templates out there online for this type of thing, I’d just like to know what real people are using.)