Ask any freelancer or small agency in Algeria about their worst client experience, and you'll almost always hear the same story: work was delivered, and payment never came — or came so late, and after so much back-and-forth, that the relationship was ruined regardless. Ask any client, and you'll hear the mirror image: money was paid upfront, and the deliverable was late, incomplete, or never arrived at all. Both problems have the same root cause — payment and delivery are not synchronized — and both are solved by the same mechanism: milestone-based escrow.
The traditional options for structuring payment on a freelance or agency project are both flawed. Paying 100% upfront protects the seller but leaves the buyer with no leverage if the work is poor or never delivered. Paying 100% on completion protects the buyer but leaves the seller exposed to non-payment after investing weeks of work. Milestone-based payments split the difference by breaking a single project into several discrete, independently funded stages — each one paid only when its specific deliverable is confirmed.
On Thiqaty, a milestone-based agreement works like this: the client and the freelancer or agency agree on a project scope broken into stages — for example, a website project might be split into design, development, and launch. Each stage has its own price and its own deliverable definition. The client funds each milestone into escrow before work on that stage begins, and the funds are released only when the client confirms the specific milestone is complete and satisfactory.
This structure changes the incentive dynamics for everyone involved. The freelancer sees proof that the client has funded the current stage before starting work on it, removing the anxiety of investing time with no financial commitment behind it. The client only ever has one milestone's worth of money at risk at any given time, rather than the full project value, which makes it far easier to say yes to a new working relationship without a long track record to rely on.
Milestones also make disputes dramatically easier to resolve, because the scope of disagreement is narrow. Instead of arguing over an entire multi-week project with dozens of moving parts, a dispute is confined to a single, well-defined stage — did the design meet the agreed brief, was the development milestone functionally complete, and so on. Thiqaty's dispute resolution process can evaluate a single milestone far more precisely than it could evaluate an entire undifferentiated project, which is part of why our median resolution time stays under 48 hours.
For agencies managing retainer-style client relationships, milestones map naturally onto monthly or sprint-based deliverables. Rather than invoicing after the fact and chasing payment, an agency can define each month's or each sprint's deliverable as a milestone, have it funded in advance, and release payment automatically once the client signs off — turning what used to be a recurring administrative headache into a predictable, automated cash flow.
We've seen this model gain particular traction among Algerian software development shops, graphic design studios, and marketing agencies working with both local and diaspora clients. For diaspora clients paying from abroad, milestone escrow funded via BaridiMob or CIB gives them the same confidence they'd expect from an established international platform, while giving the local freelancer or agency the same payment reliability regardless of where the client is based.
Milestone-based payments are not just a payment feature — they are a trust-building mechanism disguised as one. By aligning the release of money with the delivery of value at every stage of a project, both sides of the transaction stop having to rely on reputation, personal relationships, or blind hope, and start relying on a system that enforces fairness by design. That is precisely why more freelancers and agencies across Algeria are switching to milestone-based escrow as their default way of getting paid.
Ahmed Mansouri
Product Lead at Thiqaty