15 Free Indie Publisher Milestone Payment Checklist Templates and Receipt Evidence Tooling (2026)

Lawyer-reviewed standard contracts with a free tier covering work-for-hire, contractor, and developer-funding deal templates - read the standard before any line item is changed so every redline is a deliberate divergence, not an accidental gap.
Use for: contract baseline.

Milestone invoice format with project metadata, deliverable description, acceptance criteria, and payment terms in a single document - free templates serve as the structural reference even when teams ship the actual invoice from a different tool.
Best for: invoice structure.

Build provenance framework defining attestation levels for binary artifacts - 2026 partner-cert weeks increasingly expect SLSA-2 or higher provenance attached to milestone-delivery binaries, especially for AI-assisted output.
Use for: build provenance baseline.

Layout schema for declaring each step of the supply chain (source, build, test, release) and the keys authorised to sign each step - the operational primitive that makes SLSA actually verifiable in a milestone-delivery context.
Best for: verifiable build steps.

Software Bill of Materials with first-class game-asset support added in 2025-26 - attach an SBOM JSON to every milestone delivery so the publisher partner can audit dependency provenance without a re-build round trip.
Use for: SBOM attestation.

Linux Foundation SBOM standard with rich license metadata - some publishers prefer SPDX over CycloneDX for the license-clearance lane, so know both formats and which one each partner accepts before milestone 1.
Best for: license-clearance SBOM.

Generate SBOMs and scan shipped artifacts in a single CI step - Syft produces the SPDX/CycloneDX output, Grype flags known CVEs against the same artifact, both attach naturally as milestone-delivery evidence.
Use for: CI SBOM + scan.

Cryptographic build attestation attached to release artifacts directly from GitHub Actions - 2026 partner-cert weeks routinely accept GitHub-issued attestations as first-class milestone evidence without extra signing infrastructure.
Best for: turnkey build provenance.

Retention-bounded artifact storage for CI build outputs - keep the exact binary the partner accepted at each milestone so two months later the team can re-fetch the same bytes for any retroactive question.
Use for: milestone artifact pinning.

Single hash, three platforms - PowerShell Get-FileHash on Windows, shasum -a 256 on macOS, and sha256sum from GNU coreutils on Linux all produce the same 64-char hex string, so milestone receipts cross-verify without ambiguity.
Best for: artifact integrity receipts.

Release-creation CLI with attached binaries, release notes, and tags from one command - pin every milestone delivery to a tagged release so partner reviewers asking "which build did we accept on M3?" can be answered in seconds.
Use for: milestone tagging.

Demo capture for acceptance evidence - record the actual milestone walk-through on the partner call (or beforehand for asynchronous review) so "we showed it working" is video evidence, not an email assertion.
Best for: demo capture.

Email-as-evidence reference for the acceptance-email vault discipline - export every partner acceptance email as .eml (header-preserving) and store under the milestone tag, so the receipt is verifiable years later regardless of mail-client migrations.
Use for: .eml acceptance vault.

3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off-site - the rule applies to milestone evidence vaults exactly as it applies to source - apply both at milestone close and verify quarterly via a restore drill mirroring Lesson 175 retrieval discipline.
Best for: evidence vault redundancy.

Free contract-admin templates for invoicing, change orders, and acceptance-of-deliverables documents - SBA + SCORE materials are public-domain and cover the small-business contract surface most indie teams hit before legal counsel is on retainer.
Use for: contract admin basics.