Bill professional rates for custom software on nights and weekends — without letting scope creep eat the profit.

A plan with the real compliance spine for software work, not generic filler. Sales tax on software is the item most likely to bite quietly, and the ground is moving: California's SB 122 makes electronically delivered prewritten software and SaaS taxable on 2027-01-01, and Colorado's HB 26-1223 repeals its downloaded-software exemption the same day — while both states preserve an exclusion for custom-developed software, which is what you sell. The plan also gets the data-privacy split right: CCPA/CPRA largely reaches you through your client's contract, but under GDPR you are a processor directly in scope, with your own processing agreement, record of processing, security and breach-notification duties — and your own liability that no contract clause assigns away. Contractor pay is handled at the current IRS 1099 threshold of $2,000 (raised from $600 for payments made after 2025-12-31), not the stale figure.

An editable financial model whose levers are the ones you actually pull. Yellow cells for your blended effective rate, your weekly hours, your ramp length, your fixed stack and your draw. The base case runs a ~73% gross margin (direct costs are hosting, occasional subcontracted design, and delivery tooling — your own build time is a draw, not COGS), a ~$270/month truly-fixed stack, an 8-month ramp to steady state, and no loan, no lease, no payroll. It also shows you the part most plans hide: at a full owner's draw the base case runs a small cash trough in months 4 and 5 before revenue overtakes it — disclosed, quantified, and easy to design around.

Playbooks written for this trade's actual failure modes. Paid discovery that turns a vague request into a spec and a fixed bid; statements of work with acceptance criteria; 30/40/30 milestone billing and a deposit before any build work starts; a change-order process that turns scope creep into billed revenue; staging reviews, a UAT pass, secrets kept out of the codebase, and a clean handoff with the client owning the code on final payment. Plus retainer tiers priced against real support hours, and the metrics that tell you when to raise your rate.