Milestone billing
Splitting the fee into invoices that fire when named stages ship, so cash arrives during the project instead of all at the end.
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What it is
Milestone billing ties invoices to completed stages instead of to hours or to a calendar. A typical build runs 30 percent on signature, 30 percent on approved design direction, 30 percent on staging handover, 10 percent on final delivery. Every milestone needs a named deliverable and written acceptance criteria, otherwise a milestone is just a date you argue about.
Reach for it on any fixed-price project long enough that waiting until the end would hurt, roughly anything over a month. It caps your exposure only if you actually stop when a milestone invoice goes overdue. Keep building through two unpaid milestones and you are carrying two chunks, not one, so the contract needs to say that later stages do not start until the earlier invoice clears, or that you may suspend. It also gives the client checkpoints, which makes a large total easier to sign off on.
Gotcha: never make the last milestone 'on launch'. Launches slip for reasons that have nothing to do with you (client copy, legal review, an app store queue) and your final invoice slips with them. Tie it to delivery of the final build instead, and cap every approval window, or the milestone that needs sign-off will sit unsigned for a month.
Ask AI for it
Draft a milestone payment schedule for a fixed-price website build with a total fee of [amount]. Use four milestones: contract signature, approved design direction, staging handover, and final delivery. For each one give the deliverable, the acceptance criteria that make it complete, the percentage of the fee, and the invoice trigger. Add a clause that a milestone is deemed accepted if the client does not respond in writing within 5 business days, that work on the next milestone does not begin until the previous milestone invoice is paid, and that the final payment is tied to delivery of the final build rather than to public launch. Output a table plus the short contract paragraph that references it.