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> 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 whateve

• 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)