get clients to pay 50% upfront and the remainder completion for the project.

We generally do that for large projects and for new clients, but as I said earlier in the thread, they are an existing client and had paid other bills on time and without issue. I feel really annoyed as they didn’t indicate they were unhappy with the work (and indeed had approved an earlier step in the creative process) but simply said they weren’t happy with it once the bill landed on them. I firmly believe it was a simple case of them deciding they didn’t want that work doing after further consideration.

When they dangled the carrot of ‘there’s a potentially bigger project in the pipeline if you drop this bill’ I even offered to discount the future project to the same value which they declined – they are simply trying it on.

Asshats.

If payment is not forthcoming then you can legitimately argue in court that the revocation of all services including those already paid for was to protect yourself/business from incurring further costs/debt.

Only the court will decide whether that was a legitimate course of action. I’d take some convincing that you would incur further costs for hosting that is already in place and paid for. In the absence of any clear terms and conditions (and that is a clear lesson for the OP – both his hosting and his design services should have clear T&Cs. You may explicitly want to add a clause to your hosting agreement that services can be suspended if any debt from the company remains unpaid X days after it was due) the court is likely to consider what the implied T&Cs of the contract were. This might include looking at industry norms, vague email wording, the spoken evidence of both sides on what they understood etc. Without an express clause to that effect a court might struggle to accept that the contract for the hosting, which was agreed prior to the new development work even being requested contained an implied clause that any future development work that went unpaid would result in termination of the hosting service.

If you pull the plug on hosting, and they were to counter claim (and of course they may not) court decided you had acted vindictively when there is a reasonable dispute over the unrelated invoice then you might find yourself facing consequential losses (and to help avoid that you want an explicit clause in your T&Cs).

The £750 itself is not an absolutely defined figure as (1) no work was delivered; (2) no terms were agreed for how the client would be billed if the contract terminated before its completion. It may be the OP is blameless in the breakdown of this relationship, and that his assessment of the number of hours spent/value is utterly reasonable.

no work was delivered

Work *WAS* delivered – we had a project meeting (two of our team), wireframe sketching (which was approved) and a first stage of high def. designs submitted.

The contract they signed for the original piece of work (ie, the original site design and build) says:

3.2.2 suspend any or all of the Services until payment of the invoice, any interest, our administrative and legal costs of collecting payment, and any further sums payable are received by us. All Data provided by the customer or created by the Company will be destroyed after 14 days unless alternative arrangements are made with us.

We didn’t get them to sign such a contract for this much smaller piece of work though.

However, we *have* recently changed the way we work so clients now sign a ‘services’ contract for any work we do for them so such a clause is client specific rather than project specific.

‘there’s a potentially bigger project in the pipeline if you drop this bill’

LOL 😀

As you’ve rightly noted, this is one of the oldest lines in the book. My brother had this a lot when he was running a business, usually from new clients promising more work if he discounted the first job. But if you give them a discount they expect an even bigger discount next time because they’re supposedly “good customers” now !!