Caution: Ghostiebash8

I don't think you did anything wrong. 90 bucks is a lot of money to wait more than a year for nothing, with no warning. Im sorry you had to go through this! Seems stressful, their messages back to you made me uneasy. 

You know I originally wrote out this long post tut-tutting this artist and their attitude and but then accidentally refreshed the page and lost the whole progress, and figured this was a good opportunity to maybe step back and approach this with more empathy. Nothing I say is to excuse the artist, and OP, you don't deserve to have been spoken to this way. I'm sorry you went through this experience. Any faults of your own (i.e. not reaching out to the artist for communication and expressing your concerns before making an AB) you have been honest about and have tried to rectify, and everything after that point was absolutely not your fault or error.

To the artist, if you're reading this (and since you are aware OP wanted to make an AB about you, chances are you might be reading this): I get it. You've clearly had some really upsetting, negative experiences in the past that left you feeling very burned. There's a lot of frustrated aggression present in your TOS, and you also lashed out with some unrelated issues re: furries reselling your work against OP. It's clear that you've had people in the past burn you and had sales go sour due to unhelpful or disrespectful clients.

But OP apologised. You were not obligated to accept that apology, and apologies should never be made on the predication that they will be accepted. But it wasn't necessary to continue to be combative and accuse OP of not being earnest. You got very heated and lashed out, and now you need to understand that it is that which is reflecting poorly on you more than anything else. It's perfectly human to get upset and get emotional, but by your own admission this is your work, your only work, and how you pay your bills. This is your business, and as a business owner you need to be level headed, civil, and responsible in dealing with your business. You need to learn when to step away from the computer when you feel yourself getting emotionally overwhelmed, in order to better deal with customers who may upset you with a clearer head. This could have very, very easily been resolved amicably between the two of you without the hostile escalation it came to.

It sucks when you feel attacked, when you feel that you're being taken advantage of, doubly so if you've already had that happen to you. But the absolutely sucky thing about running a business is that it's your livelihood, so you have the responsibility to always conduct yourself respectably. You don't need to be a doormat to customers, but you absolutely need to be as respectful as the situation allows. If you had just paused, taken a breath, and politely but firmly reminded the client of your TOS and tried to be as friendly and helpful as possible, you could have come out of this AB looking absolutely fine. They were willing to apologise and were no longer looking for a refund once things had been clarified. They also got emotionally rattled because they were worried and scared over the possibility of being scammed, and reacted in a heated way, but were willing to back down and accept their mistakes. These things happen occasionally. It's possible to recover.

But taking a hostile foot first, repeatedly accusing the customer of things they repeatedly tell you they no longer want, and unloading unrelated issues onto them in notes has burned the possibility of that bridge. It has burned the possibility of other people coming to this beware and saying "well, the artist was a little slow but I don't mind a long wait, and they were perfectly reasonable in resolving the situation, I wouldn't mind working with them myself".

I'm not trying to say any of this to attack you. My hope is that you stop, take a breath, and learn. It's a really sucky situation; neither artist nor client can possibly feel happy about how things turned out. It's okay to get upset, frustrated, feel hurt. These are human ways to react to what feels like an attack. But you log off, you let the feeling pass, and you put on your customer service face before responding.

I'm just generally sorry a completely avoidable situation came to such an aggressive head. I hope for both of you that you are able to resolve this in ways you are both content with. Sorry to be a busybody or if my words are out of line. Best of luck to both of you.

The caution is well warranted especially that no refunds, and the aggressive wording on the tos is really enough for customers to steer away from.

Artist you really can't enforce a no refunds since that in itself is a major red flag.

Very well warranted. The way they spoke to you, how aggressive they are in their TOS, and of course how poorly run their front FA page is and how they are so bad at communication and actually getting art done in a timely are all red flags.

I just want to make a comment of the absolute gall they had saying how the 'quality would lessen because of short time limit'

They had over a year, and then have the nerve to say you're rushing them? Absolutely ridiculous, caution well warranted