A young tech professional has shared what he described as the “worst freelance experience” of his career, involving a client who allegedly turned project meetings into long conversations about astrology, coding tools and personal topics. The techie, Srajan, recounted the experience in an X post, saying the project was his first freelance assignment.
In the post, Srajan shared that he agreed to build a website for a client for just ₹3,000 because the work itself did not appear particularly complex. However, he said that the project soon became frustrating due to the client’s behaviour during meetings.
“Worst freelance experience I ever had,” Srajan wrote, describing the client as a manager with around 17 years of experience at one of the WITCH companies. He said that the project wasn’t very complex. However, things became challenging when the client allegedly insisted on daily meetings lasting around 2 hours.
Srajan said that many of those discussions had little to do with the website project. “He wanted to talk about random things. He was heavily into astrology and even asked for my DOB so he could tell me what would happen in my future,” he claimed.
The techie also claimed that one meeting was spent entirely teaching the client how to use the AI coding tool Cursor and explaining his own software development workflow. In another “late-night” meeting, he said that the client allegedly told him, “You can tell I’m drunk by looking at my eyes”.
“At that point, I just wanted out,” Srajan wrote. He said that he completed the remaining work as quickly as possible and informed the client that he did not wish to continue working together after the project ended. However, he said that the client responded, “Yeh to karna he padega”.
Srajan said that he subsequently blocked the client. “Later, I found out he made a post saying, ‘i underpaid my developer he made my website quickly for really cheap,’ and then another post saying that if I ever stole his startup idea, there would be consequences,” he claimed.
“Brother, I genuinely did not care about the startup idea. It was one of the weirdest projects I’ve ever worked on,” Srajan wrote.
Reflecting on the experience, he said that it taught him an important lesson about valuing his work and avoiding projects with extremely low budgets. “This happened about 6 months ago, and after that experience I decided I would never work for extremely cheap rates again. I could have posted his picture and exposed him, but I figured there’s no point making enemies this early in my career,” he said.
Social media reactions
In the comments section, while some users shared similar experiences, others sympathised with the engineer.
One user wrote, “Costliest 3k of your life.”
“Damn, the freelance market is definitely very bad with Indian Clients,” commented another.
“indian clients really do be the worst,” wrote a third user.
“Kinda same experience, and in my case also it was a guy from tcs, having 16yoe, managerial role. Since then, I’ve kept my distance from such people,” shared another.