Etiquette
Following up
Wait past the stated window, then send one polite line; before the window, silence is the judge working, and repeated pings only slow things down.
Guides on Etiquette: Being declined, Nothing exotic, Opening well
Chase a late delivery only once the stated turnaround has passed, and then with one calm, factual message. The days inside the window are not a silence you need to manage; they are the judge doing the work you paid for.
What silence means before the window closes
No message during the stated turnaround is not a bad sign. Recording a clip in register, reviewing it, and delivering it takes real, uninterrupted time, and a judge who is mid-clip is not going to pause to reassure you it is coming - that would just make the clip later.
What sets turnaround covers why the window is what it is: queue position, prep, the recording itself, and the judge's actual life all sit inside it, and a stated window is already a promise about all four, not an estimate padded for comfort.
Checking in during this period, even gently, adds a message the judge has to read and answer, which is time taken directly from the thing you are waiting on.
What to do once the window has passed
Once the stated turnaround has genuinely elapsed, one message is entirely appropriate. "Hi, just checking in - the [X]-day window we discussed has passed, is there an update?" is calm, factual, and gives the judge an easy way to explain a delay if there is one.
Send it once. If a few more days pass with no reply, a second message is reasonable, but the tone should stay the same - factual, not frustrated - because most delays have an ordinary explanation: a backlog, a personal circumstance, a platform issue, rarely anything to do with your specific order.
Avoid stacking follow-ups close together - a message every few hours reads as pressure rather than patience, and it does not move a delayed clip any closer to finished. Space follow-ups by days, not hours, and give each one room to actually be answered before sending the next.
What a reasonable answer looks like
A judge who replies with a new timeline, an apology, or an explanation is behaving normally, and accepting the revised date is the right response in almost every case. Delays happen in any service built around a person's time, and a single delay is not evidence of a pattern. Overruns are built into how people estimate: a 2005 review by Roy, Christenfeld and McKenzie found that people "frequently underestimate how long it will take them to complete a task", and judges are no exception.
What is not reasonable is silence after you have followed up, or a pattern of missed windows across more than one request - that moves from an individual delay into grounds for a legitimate dispute, and platforms exist specifically to give you recourse at that point rather than leaving you to keep pinging indefinitely.
What if there was no stated window at all
Some quotes come back without an explicit turnaround, which happens more often with independent judges than with panels that build a date into the intake form. If that is the case, ask for one at the time you accept the quote - "roughly how long should I expect?" - rather than guessing at what counts as late later on, since a window you never agreed to cannot really be missed.
Once you have that rough figure, treat it the same as a stated one: wait it out, then follow up once, calmly, if it passes.
Why the etiquette matters here specifically
Repeated pings do not speed anything up; they add reading and replying time to a queue that is already running behind, which makes the delay slightly worse rather than better. One well-timed message gets you information without costing the judge anything meaningful, and it is the version that actually works.
This entire question does not exist on the automated side of things - an AI score returns in minutes with nothing to chase, and a measurement has no delivery window at all beyond the time it takes you to use a tape. A human review trades that speed for a person's attention, and waiting well is part of what buying a person's attention actually involves - which an automated tool with a price on the card before you upload never asks of you. If a delivery genuinely does not arrive and a polite follow-up gets nowhere, Rate Cock's dispute process is the next step, not a third message to the judge.