A deposit is a filter as much as a protection

A deposit does two jobs, and only one of them is about money. It protects you against doing work that is never paid for, and it tells you, before you have spent an hour, whether the person on the other end is a buyer or a browser.

The second job is the more valuable one, and it is the reason to ask even when the sum involved is small.

Where the risk actually sits

Most rating work is small, fast and paid through a platform, which means the classic freelance nightmare - deliver, invoice, wait, chase - barely exists here. On a marketplace with escrow, the buyer's money is taken at the point of booking and held. You are not extending credit. You cannot be stiffed for the fee, only for the fee's timing, which is a different problem covered in the piece on hold periods and cash flow.

So the honest answer to "should I take a deposit" starts with a question about the rails, not about the buyer.

The middle row is where new earners lose money, and it almost never looks like fraud. It looks like a friendly message saying let us get started and I will place the order tonight.

Proportions that people actually use

There is no convention specific to this trade, so it borrows from the wider freelance one: a third up front is the common default for commissioned creative work, half for anything the buyer specified unusually tightly, and the full amount for jobs short enough that splitting the payment costs more in admin than it protects.

For a job worth the price of a takeaway, a partial deposit is theatre. Charge the whole thing up front or work through escrow. The overhead of two transactions, two fee deductions and two reconciliation entries is a real cost, and the arithmetic of flat per-transaction fees turns splitting a small fee into a measurable loss.

Staging becomes worth it somewhere around the point where a single job represents more than a day of your capacity. At that size, a third at booking, a third at first draft and a third on delivery is not distrust. It is the same structure every trade uses for work that cannot be un-done.

What a deposit should be called

Non-refundable and deposit are two words that get put together carelessly, and consumer rules in several jurisdictions treat a genuinely non-refundable deposit differently from a booking fee or a first instalment. This differs by country and it is worth checking yours rather than copying a phrase from someone else's terms.

The practical version that avoids most of the argument is to describe what the money buys rather than what it is not. The first payment reserves the slot and covers the scoping work. The balance covers delivery. That framing survives a dispute far better than the word non-refundable, because it names a service that was actually rendered. The wider point about writing scope down before anything else is in the two-sentence confirmation that prevents most disputes.

The filter effect

Ask a hesitant enquirer for a deposit and you will lose some of them. This is the point.

An enquirer who will not commit a third of a small fee to reserve time has, in almost every case, not decided to buy. Losing them at message three costs you nothing. Losing them at hour four, after a long specification conversation, costs you the hour and the mood.

The same logic applies to the pre-sale conversation itself, which is why charging for a scoping call is the natural companion to a deposit policy rather than an escalation of it.

When not to ask

Do not ask on a routine platform order. The escrow already did it, and adding a second payment step reads as either confusion about how the platform works or an attempt to move money off it - and buyers are right to be wary of the second. Attempting to take payment outside the rails is also the fastest way to lose an account, which matters more than any single fee.

Do not ask a repeat buyer with a clean history unless the job is unusually large. The deposit's filtering value is zero once you already have the evidence it was designed to produce.

Do not ask in a market where nobody else does and you have no reviews yet. Being the only person on a page with a payment condition attached, while also being the only person with nothing to point at, is a combination that loses bookings you could have had.

What buyers make of it

From the commissioning side, a deposit request from an established person reads as normal and from an unknown one reads as risk, which is the reverse of what earners assume. Rate Penis's account of commissioning etiquette is worth reading precisely because it describes the moment a buyer decides whether an unusual request is professionalism or a warning sign.

It is also worth knowing what the buyer's alternative costs. An automated score is instant and free, so anything you gate behind a payment step needs to be visibly not that - the technical account of what automated scoring covers maps the boundary, and the tools that package it are what a hesitant buyer will use instead if your process feels heavy.

On a platform where funds are held and released on completion, the deposit question mostly dissolves into a payout-timing question, and how Rate Cock handles judge payouts is the specific version of a general mechanism. Read your own platform's terms on when an order is captured and when it is released, because those two dates, not the deposit, are what decide whether you are ever actually exposed. A reserved payment is not open-ended either: Stripe's documentation on card holds says an online card authorisation is typically valid for 7 days, and if it expires before capture the funds are released.