I have a long term development client that recently needed to suspend development due to some financial issues on his side. Up until now for most of this year I've been on an hourly time commitment at a set rate and not on a project rate. He notified me ahead of time that starting this month, hopefully temporarily, dev work would be put on hold, and I understood and agreed.
Now, not 4 days after that he already had a request for me to fix something targeted for one of his clients. This goes along with ongoing site maintenance, and isn't new work. Ongoing site maintenance was probably 30% of the work I've done previously and been paid for hourly.
He seemed to indicate that since it was a "bug", it should be fixed even though we were not on a payment agreement anymore. The feature in question was built perhaps 6 months ago, and was only recently discovered in this client situation.
Is it appropriate to let him know I can't be fixing bugs when our agreement is suspended? Is there a way to express this without alienating him as a client, since our work may resume as soon as next month? I've let him know already that small emergency situations can be handled, but situations like this were one user finds a bug do not qualify as emergency, despite it being a client-facing issue. And it will just need to sit until work resumes.