Decide in advance how many are included

If your listing does not say how many revisions a job includes, the number is whatever the buyer asks for. You will not refuse the first one, and once you have granted the first without mentioning a limit you have established that there is no limit.

The decision is not whether to allow revisions. It is to name the allowance before anyone asks, so that granting one is policy rather than a concession.

The line between a fix and a new job

Three categories, and they get different answers.

Your error. You misread the brief, missed an axis you promised, sent the wrong file, or the recording has a fault. This is free, immediate, and you apologise once and briefly. Nothing about a revision policy applies here, because the job was not delivered. In the UK it is also the legal default for consumer services: under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute's guidance says repeat performance of a service not done with reasonable care and skill "must be done at no cost to the consumer, within a reasonable time". Other countries have their own rules, so check yours.

A clarification. The buyer understood something differently, or wants a point expanded that was inside the agreed scope. This is what the included revision is for. It should be quick, because if it is not quick the scope was written badly.

A new instruction. "Could you also cover X", "can you redo it in a different tone", "actually, use these other photos instead". This is a second job with the setup done twice, and it prices as one.

Most earners get category one right and then treat categories two and three as the same thing, which is where the free work happens. The distinguishing question is simple: does this request ask you to do again something you already did correctly? If yes, it is new work, whatever it is called in the message.

Wording the policy so it survives contact

Put it in the listing and repeat it in the confirmation message, in the same words both times.

"Includes one round of corrections within seven days of delivery. Corrections cover clarifying or expanding points already in the assessment. New material or a change of format is a new job."

Three things make that wording hold up. It has a number, it has a deadline, and it defines the category rather than listing examples - a list of examples invites the buyer to find something not on it.

The deadline matters more than earners expect. Without one, a revision request arrives eleven weeks later, when you no longer have the notes, the file or any memory of the job, and the twenty-minute fix is a two-hour reconstruction. Seven days is generous; fourteen is the outside edge of sensible.

The same sentence belongs in the written confirmation you send before starting, because that is the copy a moderator will actually read - the reasoning is in the two-sentence confirmation.

The buyer who keeps going

There is a specific pattern: each request is small, each one is reasonable in isolation, and there are five of them.

The answer is not to refuse the fifth. It is to name the position at the second, calmly and without any suggestion that anything has gone wrong.

"That is past the included round, so it would be a short follow-up piece at the rate on my listing. Happy to do it now if you want it."

Two things about that sentence. It offers rather than declines, so the buyer keeps the option and you keep the relationship. And it prices rather than argues, which is the move that ends the loop, because the request was never about the work being wrong - it was about the work being free.

Buyers accept this at a rate that surprises people. A person who charges for extra work reads as someone running a business, and the ones who react badly to a stated price were the ones heading for a dispute anyway.

When a revision is really a mismatch

Occasionally the request is neither a fix nor an upsell. The buyer wanted something categorically different from what you sell, discovered it on delivery, and is trying to get there through revisions.

Recognise this early, because no number of rounds will close the gap. The cheap exit is to say plainly that what they want is not what you offer, and either refund or point them at the format that does it. That decision is a cost calculation rather than a moral one, and when a fast refund is the cheapest available outcome sets out the arithmetic.

The upstream fix is the brief. Most of these mismatches are visible in the first message and are prevented by one clarifying question before you accept, not by any amount of care in the writing.

What your revision rate is telling you

Track it. A revision on a small minority of jobs is normal for written work and means your scope and your output are reasonably aligned.

Consistently higher and the problem is upstream of the revision: an unclear listing, a deliverable whose shape the buyer could not picture, or a habit of accepting thin briefs. Consistently zero across dozens of jobs is not necessarily good news either, since it can mean your buyers are not reading the deliverable closely enough to have an opinion about it.

Either way it is a number worth having, and it belongs in the same place as your per-job timings - the case for keeping those is in the records you will wish you kept.

One structural point. Buyers commissioning a person rather than a tool are usually buying the judgement, and judgement is the thing that cannot be revised into a different answer without becoming worthless. The buyer-side account of what a commissioned review is expected to contain is useful for spotting the request that is really asking you to change your conclusion, which is the one revision you should never grant. That request is also why an unlimited-revisions offer is impossible to sell honestly: an automated score does not revise, it recomputes, and the account of how automated scoring produces its output explains why buyers arriving from that side sometimes expect the same of you. Where a disagreement is genuinely about a measurement rather than an opinion, the settled conventions live on the measurement side, and citing one is faster than arguing.

Platforms vary in whether they hold funds during a revision window. Rate Cock's judges page documents how its own order states work, which decides whether an outstanding revision is delaying your payout or not.