There are a lot of people who will trade you stock for things. I'm certainly not saying nobody will offer you stock!
When did this equity compensation deal start? The most important feature of employee options vesting is the cliff; your deal was something like "if I'm still consulting for you 12 months from the start of our first statement of work, I get 1/4 of the promised options"?
How does tax treatment of those options work? Most of the reason that employees are put into a crunch period after they leave where they have to spend real money on shares is that US tax law requires employee options to expire within some number of days after the employee relationship terminates. But you're not an employee at all; how can you have employee stock options?
And what startup has liquid stock? I'd love to work there.
A willingness to pay in equity for consulting would to me be a red flag that the startup I was talking to was poorly managed.
Further I too would never consider stock instead of pay for any consulting activity. That's a loser move.
There is a sense in which stock compensation to a contractor is equivalent to raising cash from an investor and exchanging that cash with a contractor for services. During the first dot-com bubble, equipment vendors famously did that with startups; it allowed those vendors to book totally unrealistic sales which juiced their numbers even though they'd never see a return on the stock. It was, in effect, channel stuffing.
Today, though, a company that is willing to, in effect, raise an ad-hoc random funding round in order to get a contractor programming job done is a company whose stock is not going to be worth anything.