That's terrible man, but at least you learned from it. I had a similar issue with a client early on, but not the exact same thing. I kept putting proposals and scope documents together for a board member of a non-profit over the course of 2 months, to the tune of about 8 hours of work.
At our final meeting, he changed the scope and asked me to redo the proposal... again. At this point I had already quit my day job and was developing my own company, so I politely told him that I had already changed the documents 5+ times and that I had not been paid for any of my time. He then admitted that he didn't actually have access to funding for the project and had to get a vote from the board to fund it, but they only met quarterly. I pulled the plug. Lesson learned.
That's terrible man, but at least you learned from it. I had a similar issue with a client early on, but not the exact same thing. I kept putting proposals and scope documents together for a board member of a non-profit over the course of 2 months, to the tune of about 8 hours of work.
At our final meeting, he changed the scope and asked me to redo the proposal... again. At this point I had already quit my day job and was developing my own company, so I politely told him that I had already changed the documents 5+ times and that I had not been paid for any of my time. He then admitted that he didn't actually have access to funding for the project and had to get a vote from the board to fund it, but they only met quarterly. I pulled the plug. Lesson learned.
That's insane. Might've been my same situation (they either never had money to begin with, or were planning to pocket it all). We learn the hard way.