My auto-renewal clause just cost me $2,300 in Seattle

I put a standard 30-day auto-renewal in my service agreement without thinking twice, but when my client tried to cancel last month they hit the 60-day notice I buried on page 6. The arbitration clause in Washington state actually backed them up, so now I'm eating the loss. I checked three other contracts from local vendors and two of them had the same trap, so I'm switching everything to explicit opt-in renewals. Has anyone else gotten burned by notice periods that don't match what you actually told the client verbally?

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ryan_hart385d ago

yeah that notice period mismatch thing is brutal. i got hit with something similar last year where the verbal agreement was 30 days but the paper said 45 and the client just stopped paying. ended up having to eat two extra invoices. what i do now is put the renewal terms right in the first two sentences of every email and make them initial it on a separate line. sounds annoying but it saves way more headache than it causes. also stop burying that stuff on page 6 man thats just asking for trouble. if you cant say the terms out loud in one breath theyre too complicated.