Having an agency in Upwork is a scam

[svallejogomez]

Hello everyone, 

I want to share with you all my experience if it can be usefull for anyone, and/or in case anyone can shead a light.

After giving it a tought of building an agency on upwork, I decided to give it a try and this is extremely unsatisfying.

I can't share my account with anyone due to Upwork policy, so I decided to create an agency to bring in a team of engineers to work with clients I have.

After getting very vague responses from Upwork customer service, I decided to create an agency and get their Upwork profiles (not activated by upwork) on the agency.

It turns out it is useless yo have profiles which are not activated by upwork.

Upwork won't move a finger to activate them and I can't get them to start working with my clients.

After reading some threads on upwork community it looks like Agencies are seen very badly by clients. It's very hard to get a client to answer to any proposal, or even to get him to answer after he has invited me to a project....

Now I find out that my agency doesn't show up if I try to look up for myself.... so the agency is invisible to clients?

Upwork wont answer any of my emails, open threads, or anything on this matter....

If this feature works so bad, I would like to close the agency but I can't even get to do that!!!

😠

I'm stuck paying a monthly fee on a useless agency , with useless connects I bought...

I would appreciate if someone could give me some help, or if Upwork staff shows up after reading this. 

[AndreaG]

Hi Santiago,

I'm sorry to hear you've been disappointed with your experience creating and working as an Agency. 

I checked and can see that the team has replied to your support request about your Agency in the past, you can find their responses here. I'll also follow up with the team to make sure the support request you just submitted is also addressed and they assist you with your Agency set up.

I would like to confirm that in order for a freelancer to join an Agency they first need to complete their profile and their application to join Upwork would need to be accepted. For more information about this click here.

We do appreciate you sharing your feedback and experience with having an Agency account and we'll be sharing it with our product team that's working on improving the Agency experience.

Thanks!

[svallejogomez]

Hello Andrea G, 

Thank you for your quick reply.
Unfortunatelly I can't click on the "get help", or "my requests" buttons on support.upwork.com. Once I click on those links I can see the new link for 1 second and it redirects to the splash page. Is it a problem with my profile? your website? I have tried with different browsers and from my phone and it's the same.

Before creating an agency I asked if it would be possible to get a team set up if the profiles where not validated, to avoid the situation where I am. 
I asked: 

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

So yeah, I was able to do that. I have two colleagues in the agency with unvalidated accounts. I can't bring them in with me on hourly countracts which is where I need them to give me a hand on work.

Thank you in advance,
Santiago

[LuiggiR]

Hi Santiago,

Are you still unable to access the Upwork Help pages? If so, I'll make sure to notify the team so they can further investigate. Regarding your case, I've shared your concern with the team that's handling your support ticket so they can follow up with you. You should be able to access your tickets via your email in case you can't use the link.

Thank you.

[svallejogomez]

Hello Luiggi,

I can't access the Help pages, neither from my phone or computer (after erasing cookies).

I will continue the conversation through the email then,

Thank you,

Santiago