Started off with Paid Freelancer but switched to Agency

[#1]

Hello,

I paid for a month of membership as a freelancer and received my 70 connects. Today, I noticed that Agency was a thing and registered my company as that and paid the 20.00. Now it appears I lost all of my 70 connects I purchased as a freelancer??

Will these get credited to my Agency?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard, 

It looks like when you se tup your agency, you also made yourself an exclusive member of your agency. You can set yourself to be a non-exlusive member of your agency by visiting this page on your Agency Settings (switch to Agency context of your account > Settings > Members & Permissions > Agency Freelancer > Edit). When a freelancer is set as a non-exlusive member of the agency, they will be able to send proposals, and work as an independent freelancer from their agency. You may read more about it here. 

Once you have set your account to non-exclusive, please let me know if their are issues with your Connects, and your Freelancer Membership Plan so that I can look into this further.

[#3]

Avery,

Thank you for that tip. That seems to have resolved my issue. The additional link about Exclusive vs Non-Exclusive was beneficial as well.

-Richard

[#4]

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Richard S wrote:

Hello,

I paid for a month of membership as a freelancer and received my 70 connects. Today, I noticed that Agency was a thing and registered my company as that and paid the 20.00. Now it appears I lost all of my 70 connects I purchased as a freelancer??

Will these get credited to my Agency?

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You might misunderstand the concept of agency on upwork. You can't be an agency and not have other upwork freelancers than yourself as agency members. If you employ people in your company, they can't work on upwork projects unless the are freelancers on upwork.  

If you don't plan to do that, you are better off as a single freelancer, it's cheaper that way. 

[#5]

Matrina,

Thank you for the advice. There will be two of us, which is why I went the Agency route. I understand about having to buy seperate connects for the Agency but was worried the recently purchased connects I had as a freelancer just vanished. When I switched to non exclusive those came back. I can see your point about just doing the freelancer to save money.

Thanks!

-Richard

[#6]

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Martina P wrote:

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If you employ people in your company, they can't work on upwork projects unless the are freelancers on upwork.  

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It's not the main topic of this post, but I wanted to note that it is possible for an agency to complete Fixed-Price projects without all team members having accounts on Upwork. Individual team members would only need Upwork accounts if completing Hourly contracts where the time tracker must be used.

Thanks,

Mike