A web developer posted a payment shaming message on their client's site (opens in new tab)

My guess is it wasn't deliberate. They might not even know it's dissolved yet.

It's dissolved by "compulsory strike-off", which means the registrar did it as a penalty for late filing of accounts about 4 months after their due date, and failing to send an email saying "the company is still required" to the registrar, which is enough to prevent the dissolution.

It happened before in 2021 to this company. The company was restored a few months later, which is permitted when it's been dissolved by the registrar for filing accounts late.

Restoring a company also restores its liabilities (debts), so it's clear they were not doing it in 2021 to get out of debts.

My guess is it's an oversight by the owner, who is prone to filing things late and doesn't have an accountant. It's quite common in the UK for single-person companies to not have an accountant, and to not know all the rules.

Plenty of health conditions or life events can cause an oversight like this, especially for someone who is already prone to filing close to the deadlines.

After the company is dissolved this way, it's unlawful to continue trading, which includes paying suppliers from company funds. The owner immediately loses all company assets. Their bank accounts may be frozen or closed quickly, so they might suddenly find themselves without access to their funds. That can be a awkward if the owner wasn't expecting it, or if they don't even know it's dissolved. Business banks in the UK freeze account access for other inscrutable reasons sometimes, so it's not always obvious when the reason is dissolution.

This doesn't excuse not replying to the supplier to explain, unless they are really unlucky and lost access to their paid Google account or similar as a side effect as well. Or if they had the kind of sudden health condition or life event that causes a person to miss filing deadlines.

The thing about dissolving a company is that they generally should have done it before getting a bunch of services without paying for them.

Like a gambler they think the big win is coming any second and they drag it out too long, leaving a bunch of unpaid bills behind then.

Back when I used to work freelance, I learned that all my contracts needed to have a provision not releasing IP rights until final payment was made. This provides the legal stick to side-step going through a commercial contract dispute. You frequently run into companies wanting to pay fractions of amounts due and not having a strong incentive to hurry along a resolution. Instead, without IP assignment it becomes a copyright enforcement action instead and that can get attention and resolution much faster. I never ended up needing to use it, but I did have to remind a few customers that the provision existed. This all came out of a client stiffing me on a large bill that was, at the time, extremely damaging to my cash flow.

With the above in mind, publicly changing a customer's website to something like this is *highly* unprofessional. Better to simply force the site down in a legal manner that conforms to a signed contract.

How do you get their email to go down exactly?

I agree, if only because the UK seems to be the florida of goofball defamation cases. And while I do think the developer would win their case, having to field one at all really sucks.

In the UK, this is less of a problem, though it depends a lot on the contract between the company and the developer. Assuming nothing exotic, that the statement on the site is true (and not a malicious falsehood) and that if the hosting belongs to the end customer they did not revoke the developer's access (i.e. no unauthorised access occurred), then the developer is in a reasonable position legally. IANAL, of course.

When you don’t pay for your salesforce Licence it disables your integrations, and puts up a banner saying this has been done for non payment so you should contact an administrator.

Far be it from me to hold them up as a beacon of moral value, but in business it’s fair to say you have to pay for service.

It’s not a humiliation, it’s just factual.

This.

You're opening yourself to claims of defamation, tortious interference, disparagement, even coercion, depending on where you are. Not saying the client will win, but they can make it so you'll need to pay lots of legal fees to defend yourself.

It's much smarter to just take the site down without any kind of message, or just something that says "temporarily unavailable". Play dumb with the client, say you don't know why it went down but to fix it but you need to be paid first. Or say it depended on cloud credits that were going to come out of payment, if you don't want it to look like the site went down due to your incompetence.

Making a big public stink might feel good, but it's not a smart business strategy.

It would be interesting to see the project agreement to know if something like this was expressly outlined in it.

My guess is if it was, the client wouldn't agree to it, but who knows (many people just skim over them anyways).

> legal repercussions

like what? contract says "money for stuff". no money, no stuff.

Why would you do additional work after he failed to pay?

>If contract broken, sue them. Why throwing a scene?

Haha! tell me about it.

A client of mine ended his contract in 2010, pretending he did not use my software anymore. He had the source because I had to compile on site for technical reasons.

A disgruntled employed called to tell me and my associate he was still using it. It took me 3 years to find a proof, lawsuit started in 2014, the expertise began in 2016 and ended in 2021. I have a first trial hearing scheduled Feb, 12 2026. Expect 6 to 12 months before a decision, and of course, an appeal after that.

The guy had stocked up 5 million dollars net when I stopped him with the lawsuit [0], he is using the money to pay well known lawyers to delay the procedure every which way.

I'm out largely over 100 000 euros in court, expertise and lawyer fees, plus the countless hours spent responding to the endless, senseless dribble their lawyers produce.

As far as I'm concerned, my services are now hosted by me, and failure to pay shuts down the service, it's in the TOS.

[0 : he subcontracted for a big entity. I would never had gotten that contract myself, lacking the thief's network; said big entity never replied to our mails about our software]

because social shaming is faster and cheaper than the legal system

and doesn’t involve physical violence like the mafia

Why should the person they didn't pay for services rendered give two poops about any damage they do to the offender's brand?

You say that as if the courts are a reasonable solution for most people. In many cases the cost and time render them useless and often cost more than the invoice that is due. In some jurisdictions you may recover this, but in many you can't.

Counterpoint: airing petty grievances on the Internet has proven, time and again, to be a remarkably effective way of getting the grievance addressed by an otherwise inaccessible third party.

Evidence: just about every post on Hacker News about Google breaking that eventually attracts a personal followup from a Googler who reads HN.

If you're angry about not getting paid and your client has given you control over part of their public-facing persona, I can definitely see using that control to make it known that you are in a state of disunion with them. I can even see it being done with no harm to your reputation because other future potential clients know they will be able to pay you.

It looks like the company's owners didn't give a simple heads up to their providers before dissolving it. In my eyes, that's way worse than what this particular provider has done. If the sums aren't large, they might lose money by going to court.

This strikes me as something like a landlord changing the locks when a tenant gets behind on the rent. In many jurisdictions this is illegal, as there exists a defined process for dealing with non-payment of rent: eviction.

Yeah, I’d be wary of hiring the developer even if he’s in the right.