Milestones and escrow

How the milestone plan is written and agreed, and how escrow is split across it.

Choosing an agency does two things at once: it converts the credits held for your tier into escrow, and it opens the engagement. The brief page shows the agency’s name, the note that payment is in escrow and releases per milestone on your confirmation, and the milestone ladder. This page is that ladder.

Escrow

Your held credits become one escrow amount for the engagement. It is not paid out in one go: it is divided across the milestones you agree, and each share is released only when you accept that milestone as complete. The agency’s fee comes out of the escrow; the split between fee and Matchii’s commission is not shown to you, and the agency does not see your price.

Writing the plan

The milestone plan is yours to write, in the brief’s plan view. You can:

• Add milestones by hand. Each one has a title, a description, the deliverables, the acceptance criteria you will judge it by, and an optional target date.
• Ask Matchii to draft it. The plan can be generated from the brief, either as a whole, to fill the gaps in what you have written, or one milestone at a time. Generated milestones are proposals; edit them as you would your own.
• Reorder milestones freely.
• Allocate the escrow across them as percentages. The allocation is what makes each milestone worth something when accepted.

A plan holds up to seven milestones. Fewer, larger milestones mean fewer sign-offs and larger releases; more, smaller ones mean tighter control. Good acceptance criteria are what make the sign-off later a formality rather than a negotiation.

Confirming the plan

When the plan is right, confirm it. Confirming builds the escrow ladder from your allocation, one payment tranche per milestone, each pending until you accept that milestone. The agency can read the plan throughout, before and after confirmation.

Changing a confirmed plan

Before confirmation you edit freely. After it, a material change, to the deliverables, the acceptance criteria, a target date or an allocation, is filed as a change request rather than applied. The agency accepts or declines it; accepting applies the change. Titles, descriptions and the order stay yours to edit without approval, so fixing a typo never waits on anyone. This is deliberate: once work has started against a milestone, neither side should be able to move its goalposts alone.