Advice given before the job is still work

Nobody bills for the first three messages, and nobody should. The problem starts at message twelve, when you have explained your method, adapted it to their situation and answered the question they actually came with, and the order has still not been placed.

That conversation was the work. The delivery would have been the formality.

The cap that solves ninety percent of it

Set a limit in advance and apply it without announcing it: two exchanges to establish whether you can help, then either an order or a paid scoping call.

Two exchanges is enough to answer what you do, what it costs, how long it takes and whether their case fits. Anything past that is either a buyer who cannot decide, which no amount of further explanation fixes, or a buyer extracting the substance without the fee, which more explanation actively rewards.

How to close the free part without seeming unhelpful

Do not refuse to answer. Answer briefly, then move the conversation to its next state.

Something in the shape of: the short answer is yes, and the full version depends on three things I would need to look at properly - I can either take that as a scoping call at a set fee, or you can place the standard order and I will cover it in the delivery.

That sentence is not a refusal, it is a menu. It also does something useful for you: it prices the advice at the same rate as the work, which is the honest position, because the advice is the work.

The same filtering logic sits behind asking for a deposit before starting, and the two policies reinforce each other.

When a scoping call is a real product

For most rating work it is not. The jobs are small, the brief is short, and adding a paid call in front of a modest fee is friction that costs more bookings than it saves hours.

It earns its place in three cases. The buyer has a comparison across several submissions and needs the axes agreed first. The buyer wants a format you do not publish and the specification is the difficult part. The buyer is an organisation rather than a person, in which case there will be a meeting whether you charge for it or not.

Price it as a unit of your time at your normal effective rate, not as a token. Price is read as information about quality: in Plassmann and colleagues' 2008 study, raising the stated price of a wine increased tasters' reported pleasantness. A token fee filters nobody and signals that your hour is cheap, which then contaminates the quote that follows - the mechanism is the same one described in why the cheapest tier attracts the hardest buyers.

The version most people need

Most earners do not need a consultation product. They need a published page that answers the twelve questions the long conversation is made of, so the conversation never starts.

Turnaround, axes, length, format, what is included, what is a separate job, revision policy, price. Every one of those written down converts an exchange into a link. The scope box buyers actually read is the practical version of that page.

Buyers, for their part, generally do not expect a free consultation and are often unsure how much detail to send in the first place - the commissioning-side account of how an enquiry normally opens reads very differently from how earners imagine it. Where the questions are about measurement conventions rather than about your judgement, they have a factual answer that is already documented elsewhere and does not need your unpaid hour. And where the buyer is really asking whether a person is needed at all, what an automated score already does answers that faster and more credibly than you can.

If the enquiry turns out to be about how a platform's own judge listings work rather than about your service, Rate Cock's judges page is the place to point them, and pointing takes one line instead of four.