I've also never used rentacoder, but my observations, and the observations of others that I've heard leveled against it rarely stem from "the price is too good

I've also never used rentacoder, but my observations, and the observations of others that I've heard leveled against it rarely stem from "the price is too good to be true". Commonly the problem is that a client requests a specific attribute, let's say a local Win32 client, and the responses are almost all form letters that are clearly pitching the dev team's PHP/JSP/ASP experience: something clearly not useful for the client's needs. Can they do the job? Probably, in the same way the client could pick up a book on C++ development and figure it out himself. Another thing I've seen that makes me doubt their success is the opposite extreme: clients give _hopelessly_ vague requirements ("I want a facebook-like service") and people come back with "We have a lot of experience with PHP, it will be $1234". How do they know how much time it will take to satisfy the client? They don't even really know what he wants! What are they going to do when they run over budget? As a customer, how can I be sure they'll fix things after they think they've done a fair amount of work for their quoted dollar amount? Lastly, some other people have also seen problems and posted trolls to those sites, asking people to provide solutions to the halting problem or travelling salesman problems: obvious impossible problems to anyone with basic comp-sci understanding (I'm not formally comp-sci educated, so I don't want to sound like I'm coming from on-high here), but people will reply with bids for these programs! The general problem is a perception of a lack of quality, and the specific problem is RAC and other similar sites don't offer any easy way to verify that the coders in question meet any sort of quality bar.