I’ve spent a few years building and designing websites for small businesses and startups. Different industries, different budgets, different personalities. But after enough projects, I started to notice patterns with the people who hire me. Spoiler alert: It has nothing to do with the work itself.

It wasn’t about skill level. It wasn’t about how complicated the site was, or how niche the industry, or how “difficult” the client’s taste happened to be. The difference between a good project and a miserable one came down to something I didn’t expect. It was the energy of the person paying me.

Specifically, whether they had wealthy mindset or not.

You see, there is a big difference between someone who doesn’t have much money and someone who operates from a scarcity mindset. One is a bank account. The other is a way of seeing the world, and it shows up in every single interaction, whether or not the person’s finances match the energy they’re bringing.

What I learned, over and over, working with and negotiating against people like this, is that the problem is never about the work I was going to do for them. It was often their anxiety and need for reassurance every time I was trying to.

Here’s what I mean, broken into eight patterns I started recognizing before a contract was even signed.

1. They will always focus on the cost, never the service

Every conversation starts the same way. Not “what can you build me” but “how much is this going to cost.” Not “what problem are you solving for my business” but “can you do it cheaper.”

A person with money asks what they’re getting. A person operating from scarcity asks what they’re losing. That framing tells you almost everything about how the rest of the relationship is going to go. You’ll spend the whole project justifying your rate instead of delivering your work, because in their mind, the price tag is the entire conversation. They never talk about value.

2. They will compare you to a lower price they saw somewhere else

I can’t tell you how many times people compared me to Fiverr. Which I get; everyone is cheaper on Fiverr. That’s not an insight; that’s just math. Fiverr exists specifically to be the cheapest option available. So if that’s genuinely what you’re optimizing for, the question isn’t why I won’t match the price. The question is why you’re in my inbox at all.

Because you already know the answer. You’re not actually comparing services; you’re comparing yourself out of a decision you’ve already made. Bringing up Fiverr isn’t a negotiating tactic; it’s a tell.

I stopped taking the bait a long time ago. Not because I got thicker skin, but because I noticed that it was going to cost me more to work with them.

The client who led with “can you do it cheaper” was never the client who paid on time, valued the work, or stuck around past the first deliverable. They were also very indecisive, so extra work while not wanting to pay more is also part of it.

3. They most likely don’t have the money anyway

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. A lot of the negotiating isn’t strategy. It’s not them being savvy business owners squeezing the best deal out of a vendor. It’s that the money simply isn’t there, and the negotiation is a way of trying to make a budget stretch further than it can actually go.

I get it. Plenty of small business owners are genuinely underfunded and doing their best with what they have. But there’s a difference between “we have a modest budget, here’s what it is” and someone who drags out negotiations for weeks hoping the number magically drops by half. The second one isn’t negotiating. They’re hoping you’ll get tired and cave. And usually, underneath that hope, is a bank account that can’t cover what they’re asking for regardless of what number you land on.

4. If you do take the job, they will micromanage everything

This is the part that took me the longest to connect to the money conversation, but it’s consistent enough that I stopped ignoring it. Clients who negotiate hardest on price tend to hover hardest during the actual work.

It makes sense once you think about it. If someone is already anxious about spending money, that anxiety doesn’t disappear once the contract is signed. It just moves. Now instead of worrying about the price, they’re worrying about whether they’re “getting their money’s worth” every single day of the project. You’ll get messages checking on things that don’t need checking. You’ll get requests to see work that isn’t ready to be seen. You’ll get second-guessing on decisions you were hired specifically because you know how to make.

It’s not really about your work. It’s about their nervous system trying to manage a financial risk they’re not fully comfortable taking in the first place.

5. You’ll spend more time reassuring them than doing the actual job

This is the quiet cost that never shows up in the invoice. Somewhere along the way, the job stops being “build the website” and starts being “convince this person, over and over, that they made the right choice.”

You end up doing emotional labor you were never hired for and never billed for. Long check-in calls that don’t move the project forward. Messages at odd hours because they had a moment of doubt. Explaining the same decision three different ways because the first two explanations didn’t land, not because the explanation was bad, but because reassurance was never really what they were asking for. What they wanted was for the fear to go away, and no amount of talking makes that happen when the fear isn’t really about you.

6. They will ghost you, either at payment or right before the agreement

I’ve had it happen on both ends. Sometimes it’s right before signing, when everything has been discussed and agreed on, and then silence. No explanation, no “I changed my mind,” just nothing. Other times it’s after the work is done, when the invoice goes out and suddenly the person who wouldn’t stop messaging you for three weeks disappears completely.

Both versions come from the same place. Someone who struggles with money often struggles with commitment around money too, because committing means facing the fear directly instead of managing it from a distance. Ghosting is easier than having the conversation. It’s avoidance dressed up as busyness, and if you’ve been freelancing long enough, you learn to spot the early signs before it costs you a finished project and an unpaid invoice.

7. They were already bad with money before you ever met them

This one isn’t a judgment; it’s an observation. The habits someone brings into a business relationship with you are the same habits they bring into every other financial decision in their life. If someone is disorganized, avoidant, or reactive about money with you, that’s not a version of them created specifically for this project. That’s just who they are with money, full stop.

You are not going to be the exception. You are not going to be the one client relationship where their financial patterns suddenly correct themselves because the stakes matter more this time. If anything, the patterns get louder under pressure, not quieter.

8. They will waste your time compared to someone ready to close

This is really the sum of everything above. Time is the one resource you cannot get back, and a scarcity-minded client will eat more of it than almost any other type of client you’ll work with. Weeks of back and forth. Endless revisions to a proposal that was already fair. Long explanations for a price that was never actually unreasonable.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, there’s a client who read your rate, said yes, and is ready to start on Monday. That client isn’t necessarily “better” as a person. But they are easier to work with; they move at the pace of the project instead of the pace of their anxiety, and they let you actually do the thing you’re good at instead of managing someone else’s relationship with money.

What I actually learned from all of this

The lesson here isn’t “avoid people who don’t have much money.” Plenty of people with modest budgets are a genuine pleasure to work with, because they’re upfront, respectful of your time, and clear about what they can and can’t afford. The lesson is about energy, not income.

Scarcity mindset isn’t a tax bracket. It’s a lens. And when you’re on the other end of a negotiation with someone looking through that lens, the actual service you’re offering almost stops mattering. You could build the most beautiful, functional website in the world and it wouldn’t change the fear that’s driving the conversation, because the fear was never about the website to begin with.

Learning to notice this early, in the first email, the first call, the first “can you do it for less,” has probably saved me more time and energy than any pricing strategy ever has. Some deals aren’t worth closing, no matter how badly you want the work. Sometimes the most profitable decision you can make is to let a client go before they ever become a client at all.

-Christine D