₦airaland Forum

This is a bit of a founder story. Bear with me.

I’ve been freelancing as a product designer for years. Good work, decent clients, reasonable rates. But there was always one part of the job I dreaded which is the period after delivery.

You know the one. Invoice sent. WhatsApp read. Silence.

I used to spend more time thinking about how to word my follow-up messages than I spent on actual design work. “Is this too pushy?” “Should I wait one more day?” “What if they ghost me entirely?” The mental load was ridiculous.
So I built something about it.

SettleUp is a tool that automatically sends payment reminders to your clients via email and WhatsApp on a schedule you set. Before the due date. On the due date. 3 days after. 7 days. 14 days. It stops the moment they pay. You never write a single follow-up message yourself.
A few things I’ve learned building and launching it in Nigeria:

1. The problem is bigger than just freelancers. Small business owners, consultants, photographers, event planners… basically anyone who invoices clients in Nigeria deals with this. It’s not a freelance problem, it’s a cash flow problem that affects the entire informal professional economy.

2. The emotional cost is the real problem. Most people think late payments are purely a money issue. But the anxiety, the relationship second-guessing, the mental space it occupies; that’s actually what drains people more than the money itself.

3. WhatsApp is where Nigerian clients actually respond. Email gets ignored. A professional WhatsApp reminder from a known number gets read within minutes. Building WhatsApp into the reminder system was the most important product decision we made.

4. Pricing for Nigeria is genuinely hard. We charge ₦3,500/month which is about the cost of a decent lunch in Lagos. Some people think that’s too cheap to be serious. Some think it’s too expensive. We’ve found that framing it as “less than one hour of your billable rate” lands better than just saying the number.

The product is live at www.settleup.ng. We’re onboarding founding members now.

If you’re a Nigerian freelancer or small business owner who’s tired of the payment chase, I’d genuinely love to hear your experience. What’s your current process? What’s worked? What hasn’t?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

I’ve spoken to a lot of Nigerian freelancers:: designers, developers, writers, consultants, and I’ve noticed a pattern. Many of them charge less than their work is worth not because they don’t know their value, but because they subconsciously make the invoice amount “worth the awkwardness.”

The thinking goes: if the amount is smaller, the conversation is less uncomfortable. ₦50,000 feels easier to chase than ₦500,000. So they quote lower.

Curious what the Nairaland community thinks. Does this pattern resonate with you? Do you find yourself adjusting your rates based on how “easy” a client will be to collect from?