Five contract clauses that quietly cost freelance AI practitioners money
Grounded in the real clause rules our contract review tool checks for
These are the highest-severity patterns our contract redline tool flags most often in real freelance/consulting agreements offered to AI practitioners (prompt engineers, fine-tuners, ML consultants):
- Unlimited liability. No cap on damages you could owe the client. Standard freelance-market redline: cap liability at total fees paid under the agreement.
- Net-90 payment terms. You wait three months to get paid for work already delivered. Push for Net-30, or partial payment upfront.
- Broad IP assignment. Clauses assigning "all right, title, and interest" in work product can sweep in your pre-existing tools, prompts, and frameworks, not just the deliverable. Carve those out explicitly.
- Non-compete clauses. Often unenforceable against independent contractors in many jurisdictions anyway, but still worth narrowing to a time-boxed non-solicitation of the client's own named accounts.
- Termination at sole discretion, without notice or a kill fee. Leaves you unpaid for work already scoped or in progress if the client walks. Ask for a notice period or a kill fee covering committed work.
None of this is legal advice — it's a first pass, the same role a junior associate's initial read plays before a real attorney looks at anything high-stakes.
How we compute the rate benchmark
The actual formula behind the tool, not a black box
The rate benchmark starts from a base hourly rate per specialty (prompt engineering, fine-tuning, AI consulting, ML engineering, data annotation ops), then scales it by years of experience using a square-root curve rather than a straight multiplier — the same shape common comp-benchmarking models use so a jump from 1 to 3 years experience matters more than the same jump from 15 to 17 years. The output is a low/mid/high range (±15% around the midpoint), not a single number, because real market rates vary by client budget and project scope.
Try it yourself on the MVP page — the formula and clause rules are visible in this repo's own mvp/contract-review.js, not hidden behind an API call.