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Upwork removing 5% commission bracket and moving everyone to 10% bracket

181 points by desaiguddu 3y ago

xupybd 3y ago
That's a huge tax
benjaminwootton 3y ago
I've had a good experience with Upwork as a buyer of Development, DevOps and Design Services. There are a lot of unreliable providers there, but also some really talented, dedicated and professionals too who seem to make a good living if they live in slightly lower cost regions. We had a fairly complex client project, and it worked really well for bringing in fractional skills. 20 hours of a Spark expert, 60 hours of an Azure expert, 5 hours of someone to help install a certain tool etc. Better than hiring a generalist for a longer period. I imagine it is challenging as a freelancer, but it's a decent platform from the other side and adds value.
- desaiguddu 3y ago
  Yes, it is great platform to discover talent. It has a medium talent density, as a buyer there are lot of protections & power to switch. As a Freelancer, you similarly have challenge of working unreasonable clients.
MrThoughtful 3y ago
I have been using Upwork for years to outsource tasks. I'm still not sure what to think of them. On the one hand, I keep coming back because I usually find the better freelancers on Upwork than elsewhere. On the other hand, paying them 10% means a freelancer who works for me for two weeks works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee. And there are other fees on top of that. Upwork's overall take rate is over 15%. And what is super annoying: For every freelancer you work with, they send you 12 (!) PDFs per month. For each week, they send you: a) The invoice of the freelancer b) An invoice of Upwork 3) A receipt for your payment. Even if you worked with a freelancer for years, there is no way to switch to monthly invoicing.
- desaiguddu 3y ago
  Absolutely. Additionally they have a power to de-platform an individual. This move will potentially hurt lot of indie & freelancers who were working with long-term clients through Upwork. This is like forgoing your 5% net income.
  - benatkin 3y ago
    They seem to try harder than most not to kick anyone off. That was demonstrated in that they waited until the last possible moment to stop operating in Russia. Also their press release reads like this: > Our hearts and support go out to all those affected by this senseless war against Ukraine. We hope that a path to peace is ahead for Ukraine, and that we are able to bring our mission back to Russia and Belarus in the future. That's quite hopeful considering where things are right now. I would put them in a small set of bold companies processing lots of difficult payments including Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, and Coinbase.
- Veen 3y ago
  > works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee If they have any sense they pass the cost of the fee on to you in their hourly rate or project cost or whatever.
  - Atlas22 3y ago
    Which raises the freelancers bid, which decreases their competitiveness, which decreases the chance of winning the job/contract, which decreases overall pay. That's what one of the other commenters meant when they said they have to pay it one way or another. The only way the fee "magicly" disappears is if someone in the pipeline doesn't care about the increased cost and eats it. At which point, the freelancer is underbidding for the job anyways. The real point is having effectively having high % fee discourages/suppresses the volume of transactions. Because freelancers are pretty heavily locked into the platform by design and the companies that hire are not, the freelancers get hit with the burden of the suppressing fees to a much higher degree (they have to compete with bids from other platforms/consultants that don't have large fees)
- 3y ago
sph 3y ago
Meh, that's a dishonest title. Yes, Upwork are moving everybody on the 10% fee. But they previously had a progressive fee: * 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client * 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned * 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned Those figures are per client. Start a new job with someone else, you start from the lower bracket again. So they were basically living off short term contracts and low paid freelancers. Now it penalises everyone the same, but 10% is much more reasonable than 20% I've been trying to stay afloat in this terrible hiring market through Upwork, and I'm ambivalent. Without it, I'd pretty much be broke. But even with a profile that has been created in 2012, has $50k billed, I've only been able to find short term consulting or sysadmin jobs paid terribly, and lost 20% off each of them because of the prohibitive lower bracket.
- desaiguddu 3y ago
  IMHO, most of the Upwork jobs are upwards of $1000 if it's a serious client. A large number of freelancers & agencies have built a stable clients on Upwork from years together. It will be a little revenue shock for them. Or eventually clients will pay more to cover the costs. Let's assume you are a freelancer with a client relationship of 40k * 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client - $100 * 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned - $ 950 * 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned - $ 1500 New model - 40k Am I missing anything here? * 10% fee of any amount - $ 4000
  - sph 3y ago
    True, your figures seem correct. I guess the problem is that I haven't had any luck finding any serious client, due to the competition and race-to-the-bottom. Some clients want quality, of course, but in this economy if it's a lottery to find a job in the real world, it's a lottery for those billing upwards of $100/h on Upwork. So what's left is small contracts where being a seasoned expert to deal with emergencies is more important than being cheap.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      In general, you're probably an at least somewhat known quantity for clients that aren't especially price-sensitive (so bill in the $100s/hr range) or you're a name in a hat along with a bunch of people who will just take anything they can get. The middle-ground seems like a difficult place to be.
msadowski 3y ago
Wow, I thought they would honor the 5% charge till the end of the contracts but it seems they will go to 10% by the end of the year. Since Upwork theoretically locks you in for 2 years with a client, I’m expecting there will be a small exodus of people with long-term projects . I’d much rather sort out invoicing myself and get paid through Stripe than lose out on extra 5%.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  The main value add of Upwork for freelancers is helping them to find work in the marketplace. If you can find and bill directly, of course that may be preferable, but finding clients is hard and the business development also has a cost.
  - JCharante 3y ago
    What they’re saying is if you have a relationship longer than 2 years then you’ll just go off platform for that relationship
  - Rufbdbskrufb473 3y ago
    What I don't understand is how they keep most freelancers on the platform after finding a client. I've only used it once, but after having a call with the client, I felt comfortable accepting payment directly in crypto and not paying their fees.
    - benjaminwootton 3y ago
      I’m sure lots of people do this. The advantage of staying on the platform for freelancers is that they are guaranteed to get paid for correctly booked work on a predictable timeline. For buyers, the advantage is one weekly payment to your credit card, some contractural protection and a bunch of features to support the work. I’ve never felt the need to bypass them as a buyer, and I’ve only been approach a few times by freelancers to go direct. (My answer has been no mainly because I dislike the admin of manually paying people, checking timesheets, invoices etc.)
    - 3y ago
asnyder 3y ago
This is in addition to the % fees they also charge the buyer. As a very long time user of Upwork since before the days of oDesk and Elance, don't understand the greed here. They used to at least offer discounts on the rate when you had over $10K billings with a client. This just increases prices across the board as contractors will raise their rates to account for the fees. Silly as it gives their users motivation to give competitors a look, as well as a competitor to rise that doesn't want to be as greedy with the now common Airbnb style of charging all sides fees. Surely they got jealous of all the 20-30% fees relatively new services like Uber, GrubHub, Fulfilled by Amazon charges and figure they should get in the game as compared to their legacy thinking... Wish they'd provide additional value and services for additional revenue, rather than continue to squeeze both sides of the transaction.
- samspenc 3y ago
  Yeah in addition to the 10% headline fee, they always charge an additional 5% to the buyer, so it's really at least 15% in fees.
anonzzzies 3y ago
They must already be making a killing as they don’t do much; I mean their platform is so depressingly badly written, I don’t quite understand how you can get it to that state. They want (it’s in the rules) you to stay in their chat and communication system, but it is basically unusable for anything serious, so no one does. There is the impossible invoicing more people here mentioned; my accountant keeps asking if they cannot just send 1 invoice once per month that it is clear instead of the vague warble they send once a week. Their ‘recruiters’ are just friendly community chatters who talk a lot to people with that automatically (you get them too in the recommended list) match the skills (in their profile; there is of course no way to tell if they actually do match the skills you need; I needed an AD expert for 1 year and the recruiter introduced me to the perfect person; in a chat they admitted to me that they had worked with it once a long time ago…). This is ready for disruption. But not by something like Toptal. Which should be mentioned, if you want to talk about greed…
- anovikov 3y ago
  They are losing money and have always been. They are spending a ridiculous amount of money to bring in clients through ads and other marketing channels, and the whole thing simply doesn't look too sustainable.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    Ah, I did not know that. It looks like a goldmine considering the amounts that streams in. But yeah, if they spend a lot on acquisition; that goes very fast.
    - anovikov 3y ago
      This seems to be happening due to the nature of the freelance work itself. It simply can't work at scale in a win-win fashion: if you want to attract immense volume of clients the way Upwork does, you are inevitably looking for those who don't know what they are doing, and are lured by advertisement. And that's pricey. I've been there for 15 years and made millions; i believe whole freelancing thing exists simply due to the systematic fallacy.
z3t4 3y ago
Sites like upwork, freelancer, fiver, etc are the worst places to find contract jobs. Its a mix of very desperate people and scammers, the quality is very low, and the rates are low - attracting the worst possible buyers. No one will see your posts unless you spend money, and it costs a lot. So you are better off spending your money and time on advertising your services and do networking activities in your local area. Use your social network to find referrers. Or work for people that are good at finding jobs
fbrncci 3y ago
When I started out as a freelancer / independent contractor, I made the conscious decision to not use any of these platforms, out of fear for my client base or finances being tied up and taken away from me due to a simple ToS violation; the fees never sat with me either. Admittedly, it took so much longer to get a consistent base of clients (1-2 years), but it feels like a fresh of breath air over having to rely on another platform to do right by me. Now I am at 0% fees, NET-14 and get paid directly without a hold.
- elwebmaster 3y ago
  Don’t worry, on Upwork you can blatantly violate the TOS and even if the client complains the platform will not take away the payments. Or maybe they will, but they most definitely will not refund them to the client. Speaking from experience (as the client).
  - roflyear 3y ago
    Same experience
- jt2190 3y ago
  > NET-14 Impressive! Assuming that I’m correct and that that hyphen should be read as “minus”: How are you able to get your clients to pay in advance? Assuming that I’m wrong, it’s still impressive.
  - jt2190 3y ago
    For clarification, “NET -NN” and “NET NN” are common shorthand for describing cash flow, where the minus signifies that the customer pays before receiving the product or service, and a positive number signifies that they receive the product or service before paying. Freelancers are typically paid after providing a service.
- papertrail-work 3y ago
  The advertisement of your service seems like the best part of Upwork though. If you already have clients, there's no point in using it.
pythonbase 3y ago
I have found a number of long-term clients from UpWork. In fact, working with one since last 8-9 years, around the time UpWork was conceived. Although not so much on UpWork these days, I personally feel that having a single fee is less confusing then the so called "progressive" fee bracket.
madballster 3y ago
It is mind-boggling how this business with $600 million in annual revenues is still barely breaking even on a free cash flow basis.
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  Wow 600 million. I don’t understand where that money goes. Aren’t they just a website that connects clients with developers? Maybe they spend a lot on advertising or business development
mike503 3y ago
The 5% to 10% bump is a real kick in the pants.
stuaxo 3y ago
Just love the whole intermediation model of... well, basically all the startups on this site.
bravura 3y ago
Upwork is the prototypical clown car that crashed into a gold-mine. (Or is it?) Well it's definitely a clown car. The product experience is comically bad (like sad clown comedy). There is incredible friction in the hiring and interviewing processes. API access is disabled unless you have a through-the-nose enterprise account. I would die for a freelancer hiring platform that I could interact with programatically, so I wouldn't have to use their shitty tools. (Source: Hired through rentacoder, vworker, upwork, elance, etc.)
ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
Why are they still afloat? Last time I checked you couldn't find any work there: - You could only find jobs if you were ready to underbid everyone else. - The disproportion between the amount of work and job-seekers was abysmal. - The platform did nothing to protect the workers from untruthful or exploitative clients (from anecdotal evidence). - Upwork attracts clients who can't find contractors any other way, mostly because of unrealistic compensation expectation, unreasonable requirements, or poor reputation. This leads to the average job being an underwhelming experience (to put it in generous terms). Moreover, being on Upwork is a sign of desperation. You fear the day any of your regular clients notices and asks why are you there or just starts to doubt you. The proposition of the service is very attractive, but I'm not sure if it brings more value than harm in practice. It's very hard to find clients nowadays, but I'm still fighting the urge to restore my account there.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The same reason Uber still has drivers. There are plenty of people in the market for gig work however low paying.
- roflyear 3y ago
  They don't protect employers either. We had a guy whos contract was still open and he booked 80hrs and scammed us and then closed his account. Couldn't get the money back from upwork
- winrid 3y ago
  It was that way from day one. It is like it's own career. You start off being underpaid to get a reputation, and work your way up. Weird story: I started my career on odesk (before it was called upwork) and finished 50 or so contracts before I moved 3.5k miles to my first bay area job. Which was across the street from the odesk office. Weird world.
- bomewish 3y ago
  > Upwork attracts clients who can't find contractors any other way What is the best 'other way', though? Situation: Technical guy at a small company or nonprofit who needs _X_ more complicated technical task done. The choice is either to learn some new skill (lots of time) or find an expert. What other expert marketplaces are there that offer a substantially better environment or experience for all parties?
scarface74 3y ago
For reference: I was unfortunate enough to be a tech lead after a company got bought out by private equity. Their edict was “they don’t want to be a tech company”. I was forced to hire contractors through an agency. They charged us at least 20% more than the contractor. I also work in cloud consulting at $BigTech. I know exactly how much money I bring into the company at I know how much my bill rate is. The company takes much more than a 10% cut. On a broader note: it’s easy to find out how much revenue BigTech brings in per employee and compare it to your compensation.
greatgib 3y ago
I find it shameless that after a 10% cut on back of the worker, they make it complex and confusing by not just rounding down the amount of their fee.
hakube 3y ago
How's Upwork nowadays? I tried getting some gigs there for 3+ years and got nothing. I had more success with r/forhire and Craigslist and the good thing is there's no middleman. Heck, I even spent for Freelancer Plus and I just lost my connects to people who didn't even consider to read my proposal and check my profile
- bogwog 3y ago
  I used it many years ago and it was decent, but not good. Tried again recently and it’s way worse than I remember. Pretty much every client expects you to enter a bidding war starting at $100 (and going down, obv) to build them a multiplatform app with backend and a mountain of features. What I don’t understand is who accepts these jobs? Scammers? I can’t imagine that Upwork has many happy clients.
  - anaganisk 3y ago
    $100 in US is INR8000 in India, if the job timeline is one week, and they took up 4 jobs in a month that is 32,000. Which is more than the entry level software job salary. Upwork is a global company, not just the US market, so thinking in local currency won't make sense. I was on Fiverr 7 years ago I explored it a lot, during my course of finding work there I came across interesting things. There were dedicated shops that took up 10-15 projects a week in the same bracket as u mention, the owner of one such shop bought a Harley Davidson in a year(Harley Davidson bikes cost a lot in India) his shop was 4 fresh out graduates who exclusively built WordPress websites. And there are many such groups. Also funny enough most of the logo/graphic design/video edit jobs a remixes of PSDs/templates found on envato, freelogogenerator etc. You rarely find quality in such sites, you get what you pay for.
oivoodoo_ 3y ago
I lost believe to work via upwork to be honest. I have the profile 10 yo. and after the changes with connects to use to send for the dead job posts as result it's really unfair. then they added more commissions and the rules are always changing. I feel like now it's better to search the job in LinkedIn via the connections and the jobs posts with Fast Apply option. I don't promote LinkedIn but it's more attractive for me for now. Also what you get by paying the huge commission and timer that screens you? they don't help you promote, autocomplete cover letters, what the real advantage in this case.
- biql 3y ago
  They do help with promotion by giving "top rated" and "raising talent" badges and work history. Hard to say how much value and leverage it really gives and whether it worths all the downsides.
  - oivoodoo_ 3y ago
    work history is github or linkedin or gitlab to show your the real examples. But the ideas around connects, fees, it's really unsuitable to deal with the platform. Even the job post could be dead because the author left the platform and found the freelancer in the other place. and as result the connect points could not be restored. at least I had such experience by buying connects to apply and then I skipped this idea and didn't come back.
deleted 3y ago
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bilsbie 3y ago
Is there any good way to move upmarket from upwork?
jesushax 3y ago
Coincidentally, I just became Top Rated Plus (as opposed to normal Top Rated) on Upwork thanks to finishing my first large contract! I'm going to have a mini-party with my wife to celebrate, haha. Upwork dramatically changed my life. I don't care much either way about the fee change, but I get why other people do.
steve76 3y ago
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uwedreiss 3y ago
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181 points by desaiguddu 3y ago

That's a huge tax

I've had a good experience with Upwork as a buyer of Development, DevOps and Design Services. There are a lot of unreliable providers there, but also some really talented, dedicated and professionals too who seem to make a good living if they live in slightly lower cost regions. We had a fairly complex client project, and it worked really well for bringing in fractional skills. 20 hours of a Spark expert, 60 hours of an Azure expert, 5 hours of someone to help install a certain tool etc. Better than hiring a generalist for a longer period. I imagine it is challenging as a freelancer, but it's a decent platform from the other side and adds value.

desaiguddu 3y ago
Yes, it is great platform to discover talent. It has a medium talent density, as a buyer there are lot of protections & power to switch. As a Freelancer, you similarly have challenge of working unreasonable clients.

MrThoughtful 3y ago

I have been using Upwork for years to outsource tasks. I'm still not sure what to think of them. On the one hand, I keep coming back because I usually find the better freelancers on Upwork than elsewhere. On the other hand, paying them 10% means a freelancer who works for me for two weeks works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee. And there are other fees on top of that. Upwork's overall take rate is over 15%. And what is super annoying: For every freelancer you work with, they send you 12 (!) PDFs per month. For each week, they send you: a) The invoice of the freelancer b) An invoice of Upwork 3) A receipt for your payment. Even if you worked with a freelancer for years, there is no way to switch to monthly invoicing.

desaiguddu 3y ago
Absolutely. Additionally they have a power to de-platform an individual. This move will potentially hurt lot of indie & freelancers who were working with long-term clients through Upwork. This is like forgoing your 5% net income.
- benatkin 3y ago
  They seem to try harder than most not to kick anyone off. That was demonstrated in that they waited until the last possible moment to stop operating in Russia. Also their press release reads like this: > Our hearts and support go out to all those affected by this senseless war against Ukraine. We hope that a path to peace is ahead for Ukraine, and that we are able to bring our mission back to Russia and Belarus in the future. That's quite hopeful considering where things are right now. I would put them in a small set of bold companies processing lots of difficult payments including Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, and Coinbase.
Veen 3y ago
> works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee If they have any sense they pass the cost of the fee on to you in their hourly rate or project cost or whatever.
- Atlas22 3y ago
  Which raises the freelancers bid, which decreases their competitiveness, which decreases the chance of winning the job/contract, which decreases overall pay. That's what one of the other commenters meant when they said they have to pay it one way or another. The only way the fee "magicly" disappears is if someone in the pipeline doesn't care about the increased cost and eats it. At which point, the freelancer is underbidding for the job anyways. The real point is having effectively having high % fee discourages/suppresses the volume of transactions. Because freelancers are pretty heavily locked into the platform by design and the companies that hire are not, the freelancers get hit with the burden of the suppressing fees to a much higher degree (they have to compete with bids from other platforms/consultants that don't have large fees)
3y ago

sph 3y ago

Meh, that's a dishonest title. Yes, Upwork are moving everybody on the 10% fee. But they previously had a progressive fee: * 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client * 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned * 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned Those figures are per client. Start a new job with someone else, you start from the lower bracket again. So they were basically living off short term contracts and low paid freelancers. Now it penalises everyone the same, but 10% is much more reasonable than 20% I've been trying to stay afloat in this terrible hiring market through Upwork, and I'm ambivalent. Without it, I'd pretty much be broke. But even with a profile that has been created in 2012, has $50k billed, I've only been able to find short term consulting or sysadmin jobs paid terribly, and lost 20% off each of them because of the prohibitive lower bracket.

desaiguddu 3y ago
IMHO, most of the Upwork jobs are upwards of $1000 if it's a serious client. A large number of freelancers & agencies have built a stable clients on Upwork from years together. It will be a little revenue shock for them. Or eventually clients will pay more to cover the costs. Let's assume you are a freelancer with a client relationship of 40k * 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client - $100 * 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned - $ 950 * 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned - $ 1500 New model - 40k Am I missing anything here? * 10% fee of any amount - $ 4000
- sph 3y ago
  True, your figures seem correct. I guess the problem is that I haven't had any luck finding any serious client, due to the competition and race-to-the-bottom. Some clients want quality, of course, but in this economy if it's a lottery to find a job in the real world, it's a lottery for those billing upwards of $100/h on Upwork. So what's left is small contracts where being a seasoned expert to deal with emergencies is more important than being cheap.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    In general, you're probably an at least somewhat known quantity for clients that aren't especially price-sensitive (so bill in the $100s/hr range) or you're a name in a hat along with a bunch of people who will just take anything they can get. The middle-ground seems like a difficult place to be.

msadowski 3y ago

Wow, I thought they would honor the 5% charge till the end of the contracts but it seems they will go to 10% by the end of the year. Since Upwork theoretically locks you in for 2 years with a client, I’m expecting there will be a small exodus of people with long-term projects . I’d much rather sort out invoicing myself and get paid through Stripe than lose out on extra 5%.

benjaminwootton 3y ago
The main value add of Upwork for freelancers is helping them to find work in the marketplace. If you can find and bill directly, of course that may be preferable, but finding clients is hard and the business development also has a cost.
- JCharante 3y ago
  What they’re saying is if you have a relationship longer than 2 years then you’ll just go off platform for that relationship
- Rufbdbskrufb473 3y ago
  What I don't understand is how they keep most freelancers on the platform after finding a client. I've only used it once, but after having a call with the client, I felt comfortable accepting payment directly in crypto and not paying their fees.
  - benjaminwootton 3y ago
    I’m sure lots of people do this. The advantage of staying on the platform for freelancers is that they are guaranteed to get paid for correctly booked work on a predictable timeline. For buyers, the advantage is one weekly payment to your credit card, some contractural protection and a bunch of features to support the work. I’ve never felt the need to bypass them as a buyer, and I’ve only been approach a few times by freelancers to go direct. (My answer has been no mainly because I dislike the admin of manually paying people, checking timesheets, invoices etc.)
  - 3y ago

asnyder 3y ago

This is in addition to the % fees they also charge the buyer. As a very long time user of Upwork since before the days of oDesk and Elance, don't understand the greed here. They used to at least offer discounts on the rate when you had over $10K billings with a client. This just increases prices across the board as contractors will raise their rates to account for the fees. Silly as it gives their users motivation to give competitors a look, as well as a competitor to rise that doesn't want to be as greedy with the now common Airbnb style of charging all sides fees. Surely they got jealous of all the 20-30% fees relatively new services like Uber, GrubHub, Fulfilled by Amazon charges and figure they should get in the game as compared to their legacy thinking... Wish they'd provide additional value and services for additional revenue, rather than continue to squeeze both sides of the transaction.

samspenc 3y ago
Yeah in addition to the 10% headline fee, they always charge an additional 5% to the buyer, so it's really at least 15% in fees.

anonzzzies 3y ago

They must already be making a killing as they don’t do much; I mean their platform is so depressingly badly written, I don’t quite understand how you can get it to that state. They want (it’s in the rules) you to stay in their chat and communication system, but it is basically unusable for anything serious, so no one does. There is the impossible invoicing more people here mentioned; my accountant keeps asking if they cannot just send 1 invoice once per month that it is clear instead of the vague warble they send once a week. Their ‘recruiters’ are just friendly community chatters who talk a lot to people with that automatically (you get them too in the recommended list) match the skills (in their profile; there is of course no way to tell if they actually do match the skills you need; I needed an AD expert for 1 year and the recruiter introduced me to the perfect person; in a chat they admitted to me that they had worked with it once a long time ago…). This is ready for disruption. But not by something like Toptal. Which should be mentioned, if you want to talk about greed…

anovikov 3y ago
They are losing money and have always been. They are spending a ridiculous amount of money to bring in clients through ads and other marketing channels, and the whole thing simply doesn't look too sustainable.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Ah, I did not know that. It looks like a goldmine considering the amounts that streams in. But yeah, if they spend a lot on acquisition; that goes very fast.
  - anovikov 3y ago
    This seems to be happening due to the nature of the freelance work itself. It simply can't work at scale in a win-win fashion: if you want to attract immense volume of clients the way Upwork does, you are inevitably looking for those who don't know what they are doing, and are lured by advertisement. And that's pricey. I've been there for 15 years and made millions; i believe whole freelancing thing exists simply due to the systematic fallacy.

z3t4 3y ago

Sites like upwork, freelancer, fiver, etc are the worst places to find contract jobs. Its a mix of very desperate people and scammers, the quality is very low, and the rates are low - attracting the worst possible buyers. No one will see your posts unless you spend money, and it costs a lot. So you are better off spending your money and time on advertising your services and do networking activities in your local area. Use your social network to find referrers. Or work for people that are good at finding jobs

fbrncci 3y ago

When I started out as a freelancer / independent contractor, I made the conscious decision to not use any of these platforms, out of fear for my client base or finances being tied up and taken away from me due to a simple ToS violation; the fees never sat with me either. Admittedly, it took so much longer to get a consistent base of clients (1-2 years), but it feels like a fresh of breath air over having to rely on another platform to do right by me. Now I am at 0% fees, NET-14 and get paid directly without a hold.

elwebmaster 3y ago
Don’t worry, on Upwork you can blatantly violate the TOS and even if the client complains the platform will not take away the payments. Or maybe they will, but they most definitely will not refund them to the client. Speaking from experience (as the client).
- roflyear 3y ago
  Same experience
jt2190 3y ago
> NET-14 Impressive! Assuming that I’m correct and that that hyphen should be read as “minus”: How are you able to get your clients to pay in advance? Assuming that I’m wrong, it’s still impressive.
- jt2190 3y ago
  For clarification, “NET -NN” and “NET NN” are common shorthand for describing cash flow, where the minus signifies that the customer pays before receiving the product or service, and a positive number signifies that they receive the product or service before paying. Freelancers are typically paid after providing a service.
papertrail-work 3y ago
The advertisement of your service seems like the best part of Upwork though. If you already have clients, there's no point in using it.

pythonbase 3y ago

I have found a number of long-term clients from UpWork. In fact, working with one since last 8-9 years, around the time UpWork was conceived. Although not so much on UpWork these days, I personally feel that having a single fee is less confusing then the so called "progressive" fee bracket.

madballster 3y ago

It is mind-boggling how this business with $600 million in annual revenues is still barely breaking even on a free cash flow basis.

bazmattaz 3y ago
Wow 600 million. I don’t understand where that money goes. Aren’t they just a website that connects clients with developers? Maybe they spend a lot on advertising or business development

mike503 3y ago

The 5% to 10% bump is a real kick in the pants.

stuaxo 3y ago

Just love the whole intermediation model of... well, basically all the startups on this site.

bravura 3y ago

Upwork is the prototypical clown car that crashed into a gold-mine. (Or is it?) Well it's definitely a clown car. The product experience is comically bad (like sad clown comedy). There is incredible friction in the hiring and interviewing processes. API access is disabled unless you have a through-the-nose enterprise account. I would die for a freelancer hiring platform that I could interact with programatically, so I wouldn't have to use their shitty tools. (Source: Hired through rentacoder, vworker, upwork, elance, etc.)

ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago

Why are they still afloat? Last time I checked you couldn't find any work there: - You could only find jobs if you were ready to underbid everyone else. - The disproportion between the amount of work and job-seekers was abysmal. - The platform did nothing to protect the workers from untruthful or exploitative clients (from anecdotal evidence). - Upwork attracts clients who can't find contractors any other way, mostly because of unrealistic compensation expectation, unreasonable requirements, or poor reputation. This leads to the average job being an underwhelming experience (to put it in generous terms). Moreover, being on Upwork is a sign of desperation. You fear the day any of your regular clients notices and asks why are you there or just starts to doubt you. The proposition of the service is very attractive, but I'm not sure if it brings more value than harm in practice. It's very hard to find clients nowadays, but I'm still fighting the urge to restore my account there.

ghaff 3y ago
The same reason Uber still has drivers. There are plenty of people in the market for gig work however low paying.
roflyear 3y ago
They don't protect employers either. We had a guy whos contract was still open and he booked 80hrs and scammed us and then closed his account. Couldn't get the money back from upwork
winrid 3y ago
It was that way from day one. It is like it's own career. You start off being underpaid to get a reputation, and work your way up. Weird story: I started my career on odesk (before it was called upwork) and finished 50 or so contracts before I moved 3.5k miles to my first bay area job. Which was across the street from the odesk office. Weird world.
bomewish 3y ago
> Upwork attracts clients who can't find contractors any other way What is the best 'other way', though? Situation: Technical guy at a small company or nonprofit who needs _X_ more complicated technical task done. The choice is either to learn some new skill (lots of time) or find an expert. What other expert marketplaces are there that offer a substantially better environment or experience for all parties?

scarface74 3y ago

For reference: I was unfortunate enough to be a tech lead after a company got bought out by private equity. Their edict was “they don’t want to be a tech company”. I was forced to hire contractors through an agency. They charged us at least 20% more than the contractor. I also work in cloud consulting at $BigTech. I know exactly how much money I bring into the company at I know how much my bill rate is. The company takes much more than a 10% cut. On a broader note: it’s easy to find out how much revenue BigTech brings in per employee and compare it to your compensation.

greatgib 3y ago

I find it shameless that after a 10% cut on back of the worker, they make it complex and confusing by not just rounding down the amount of their fee.

hakube 3y ago

How's Upwork nowadays? I tried getting some gigs there for 3+ years and got nothing. I had more success with r/forhire and Craigslist and the good thing is there's no middleman. Heck, I even spent for Freelancer Plus and I just lost my connects to people who didn't even consider to read my proposal and check my profile

bogwog 3y ago
I used it many years ago and it was decent, but not good. Tried again recently and it’s way worse than I remember. Pretty much every client expects you to enter a bidding war starting at $100 (and going down, obv) to build them a multiplatform app with backend and a mountain of features. What I don’t understand is who accepts these jobs? Scammers? I can’t imagine that Upwork has many happy clients.
- anaganisk 3y ago
  $100 in US is INR8000 in India, if the job timeline is one week, and they took up 4 jobs in a month that is 32,000. Which is more than the entry level software job salary. Upwork is a global company, not just the US market, so thinking in local currency won't make sense. I was on Fiverr 7 years ago I explored it a lot, during my course of finding work there I came across interesting things. There were dedicated shops that took up 10-15 projects a week in the same bracket as u mention, the owner of one such shop bought a Harley Davidson in a year(Harley Davidson bikes cost a lot in India) his shop was 4 fresh out graduates who exclusively built WordPress websites. And there are many such groups. Also funny enough most of the logo/graphic design/video edit jobs a remixes of PSDs/templates found on envato, freelogogenerator etc. You rarely find quality in such sites, you get what you pay for.

oivoodoo_ 3y ago

I lost believe to work via upwork to be honest. I have the profile 10 yo. and after the changes with connects to use to send for the dead job posts as result it's really unfair. then they added more commissions and the rules are always changing. I feel like now it's better to search the job in LinkedIn via the connections and the jobs posts with Fast Apply option. I don't promote LinkedIn but it's more attractive for me for now. Also what you get by paying the huge commission and timer that screens you? they don't help you promote, autocomplete cover letters, what the real advantage in this case.

biql 3y ago
They do help with promotion by giving "top rated" and "raising talent" badges and work history. Hard to say how much value and leverage it really gives and whether it worths all the downsides.
- oivoodoo_ 3y ago
  work history is github or linkedin or gitlab to show your the real examples. But the ideas around connects, fees, it's really unsuitable to deal with the platform. Even the job post could be dead because the author left the platform and found the freelancer in the other place. and as result the connect points could not be restored. at least I had such experience by buying connects to apply and then I skipped this idea and didn't come back.

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bilsbie 3y ago

Is there any good way to move upmarket from upwork?

jesushax 3y ago

Coincidentally, I just became Top Rated Plus (as opposed to normal Top Rated) on Upwork thanks to finishing my first large contract! I'm going to have a mini-party with my wife to celebrate, haha. Upwork dramatically changed my life. I don't care much either way about the fee change, but I get why other people do.

steve76 3y ago

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uwedreiss 3y ago

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