It’s missing another option. Contract for a date, for a set amount of hours, until a completion date.

There’s an hours version but it’s based on weekly hours, not total hours.

There’s one based on date but not taking into account hours.

Could you clarify what you mean by "weekly hours, not total hours"? If you input weekly hours and a completion date, doesn't that achieve exactly what you want? The contract will be valid until the date that you specify, and during the time that the contract is valid, you can charge approximately the amount of weekly hours specified. For example, if you have agreed to charge 40 hours per week for 4 weeks, then that is the same thing as agreeing to 160 hours in total. The wording in the generated contract is such that you don't have to work the exact same amount of hours each week, you can work more during one week and less during another week.

Perhaps you mean that you want to lock down an exact, specific number of hours, rather than allowing any sort of flexibility on the total number of hours? This would be better suited for the "project based billing" option, but as you said, that one doesn't have the option to set a completion date. The reason why it doesn't have the possibility to set a completion date is that it would create an ugly contractual situation in the case where the deliverables are not completed by the agreed-upon date.

In the US, dates are quite important on all contracts.

I've been told that if I don't have clear dates, my contracts could get nullified in court.

Sounds like this is a difference between legal systems in Finland vs US. In Finland it's okay to sign a contract that remains in force indefinitely.

I'll bet there's ways to do that in the US, too, but I guess it needs some "secret sauce" to make it work.

Source: IANAL.

Good job! I think this could be a valuable service, but the differences between legal systems could be a blocker.

Welcome to Enterprise Consulting in the US. Where you live or die by the SOW.

As technical advisor to the project, I bill my hours, for a set amount of time, my deliverable is my knowledge and support and my rating is the outcome of the project.