$10 fee for new contracts makes upwork unattractive

[jordimr]

For the one-off user $10 may not be a great  hit, but for people who rely on upwork to hire a lot of people this adds a very significant cost.

My impression is competition will benefit greatly from this move. There is a lot of nice talent, but the platform itself has a lot to improve, and at this price it just becomes very unattractive. Will start looking for alternatives seriously, at the moment I'm hiring most of my life in upwork.

As a client this feels like abusive behaviour.

[48f850a0]

Unless a client is paying cheap, i don't see how 10$ is a "hit" if you already going to be paying reasonably on a project, 10$ is nothing... Only cheap clients or projects would mk that fee look too large... Even recruitment agencies charge for their services.

Freelancers already spend 100s of dollars to be ignored by clients, so nothing has been attractive for a long time tbh

[spectralua]

I saw an day ago topic where client claimed about freelancer-scammer. That client wasted terrible $3 and asked Upwork to refund expences. He have no more money to waste and want that $3 back to hire someone else. Such rich clients here now! 🙂

[37bffaae]

I have a less than an hour job to replace some greenscreen with a moving camera. Many people can do this quickly, but not me. You know hourly rates, so am I cheap for not wanting to pay the platform $10 to connect me?

[48f850a0]

Let's take away the 10$ feee for instance, how much would you want to pay for such task given it's less than an hour? Because I am very certain despite it being a quick task you wouldn't want to hire someone without experience or a noob..Correct?

Given the cost of applying to jobs and purchasing connects and all on freelancers side, there are certain prices of jobs that are a turn off to even apply to, despite the freelancer being able to do it..

So take away the 10$ Upwork fee, not many freelancers would be very much interested in little projects these days, people are looking to make money, alot of spending is going into connects, 

Everyone is affected by cost here on Upwork, but i think freelancers take the biggest hits in cost

[williamtcooper]

Jordi,

Both freelancers and clients are having to pay more fees on Upwork in 2024 which is unlikely to change especially since their competition is even more expensive.

[mathgirl]

Hello Jordi,

If you feel that 10$ are too much for a client, let me update you on what it is going on with freelancers.

I am a long standing member of the "Upwork" community, and so is my husband who, in the last twelve years has invoiced 900K+ paying Upwork about six percent of that amount in fees.

We both have impeccable ratings.

In the past, the freelancers that came up in your search would "rotate" and, somehow, a preference was given to those who performed more professionally, at least at the very beginning.
You would get the "best talent" rank automatically.

A couple of years ago, Upwork decided to monetize the site on the freelancer side, on top of the ever-lasting fee which is now a whopping 10%.
They introduced "connects", and this is the situation at the moment:

1) in order to show up high in the searches for talent, freelancers can buy "connects" and bid on clicks resulting from the client's search. Therefore, the top results you are getting are not "organically rotating" and they do not represent the best talent here. They represent the minority who is willing to invest on connects (including potential agencies who might fund their staff). Each time yoh click on their profile, they will be "debited" the number of connects they bid;

2) in order to apply for jobs we also have to get connects. About ten connects come with the free subscription, if I am not mistaken, but the majority of jobs will charge you 8/16 connects to apply;

3) we can also "boost" our position in the list of those who answered your job post. Often, for more interesting (read not scammy) jobs the boost can reach 100 connects to wind up first. Again, the order has nothing to do with quality, it is a "sponsored" result;

4) if a freelancer is not willing to apply for jobs nor to boost in searches, he/she/they can set the availability. Guess? Yes! You did. A bunch of connects more.

And again: please note visibility has NOTHING to do with reliability, nor experience, nor the ethical approach that any business should have about rewarding those who helped build reputation and quality since the beginning.

Upwork will "repay connects" (partially of course) when the freelancer is outbid. But quite because clients are unaware of this system, often contracts stay open forever and we have to buy more connects. 
Each connect costs 0,15 USD. You can do the math.

The quality of the jobs posted went down, there are plenty of scammers roaming, and some questionable "automated" job posts which make the overall experience even more depressing.

At the moment, I am refusing to buy more connects. I have 21 open jobs in my queue, the result of a couple of weeks on unproductive investiments.

Are you feeling better now? 😊

Cheers,

Milena

[48f850a0]

You've said it all, 10$ is arguably high, but that is per hire and i doubt any client would need to hire more than 5 freelancers per month for example, which would sum up to 50$ or so.

Compare that to what freelancers spend in a week on connects.... Honestly that's nothing, freelancers are the ones burning the cash here on Upwork.. let the truth be told

[celgins]

For the record, the one-time contract initiation fee that clients pay when making their first payment to a freelancer is up to $9.95 USD, which means it's not $9.95 for every job.

Many clients avoid this fee by not hiring freelancers at all; instead, they solicit tests, feedback, and full solutions to get their work completed for free, or leave Upwork and seek services elsewhere. This is also abusive behavior.

[bobafett999]

Jordi,  Jordi, Jordi....if you are a cheap bargain hunting buyer with low budget the $10 is high.  If you are a decent paying buyer, $10 is noise in overall value you may be getting using freelancers.

Many freelancers spend that much for a chance to win your low budget gig!

[2e1278d9]

As a client, I think freelancers here are using this comment as an opportunity to have a dig at people who want to get cost-effective hires/expenses. 

There's no need, as a freelancer, to be defending Upwork on adding additional costs on clients. The vast majority of clients are not large companies with vast amounts of cash. 

Let's not forget that marketplace fees also increased recently, also. 

Yes it's only $10. But for me that's another $10, on top of the already $150 I've spent on fees in the last 6 weeks or so. 

And considering the income Upwork earn from freelancers (10% of my approx. $4,000 spend over that time), this totals around $550 income per month from a single, relatively low spend client. These costs are not insignificant. And, again, defending Upwork for charging this makes no sense. It's not like the freelancers will get any better deals out of it. 

This additional fee, on top of the price increases in 2023 (or maybe it was 22, I can't remember), without anything in the way of platform improvements (that I can see), it difficult to swallow. Much like the OP, I will begin looking elsewhere from now on rather than pay another fee.

[mathgirl]

Hello Ben,

My intention was far from defending anybody. It was about showing what, as a freelancer, I have to through to even have the opportunity to find a job (something that was rather easy a while ago and which now has become a really stressing, expensive, and demoralizing experience). 
I feel that clients are not aware of what even answering a job ad means on our side. I have an awesome profile, and impeccable feedback. Landing a job which does not result into a questionable gig has become almost impossible. 
My post was about how this platform, if the modus operandi does not change, might be facing hard times in the future.

One more thing:is it morally acceptable to charge such high fees on somebody who needs a job to feed her kids (just like in my case) while having to deal with questionable characters, scams, fake automated job ads? The same goes for a client, of course, but you will maybe agree that those "looking" might be more desperate than those "hiring"?

Cheers,

Milena

[bobafett999]

Go ahead.  As a businessman you must explore your options, and go where you can find cheaper solutions.

**Edited for Community Guidelines**

[37bffaae]

Yikes Prashant. 🙈🙈  Have a re-read. Ben nailed it.

[bobafett999]

Ben post smells like cheapskate whining.  Need I say more?

[2e1278d9]

Maybe you need to re-read it. And instead of having a dig at someone, add a comment that furthers the discussion, Prashant.

[sein_mac]

Hi Jordi.

It's an interseting topic. You make good points and I understand raising costs makes running a bussiness a lot more challenging. In my view however, these kinds of fees will help stamp out scams, bogus job posts / profiles, time wasters, and hopefully filter out a lot of the empty noise that's causing fustration and even harm in some cases on the platform.

Finding and hirining talent is very time consuming and can be costly for many businesses, but I don't see why a small job should be any different and I don't think a scalable system would work better. Equally, when a person goes for a job interview it costs money, and its usualy a lot more then $3, especially when you add time.

I believe that if we want to expect a decent quailty platform then we should expect that it will cost to engage with it. Personally as a client I'd rather pay more for a guaranteed higher quality result. Also, as a freelancer I'm not thrilled we are seeing simliar raising costs to engage on the platform but I am hopeful this move from Upwork will provide long term benifits that address current problems.

While $10 seems high compared to $3, I feel $3 is far too low - I know of many high quality freelancers who would not apply to work with a client that is not prepared to pay $10 to speak with potenially dozens, if not more, freelancers. Typicaly the cost for a business to headhunt or interview 60 candidates would be much much higher then $10.

[b86b6932]

The last part made the whole point.

[los123]

The problem is the platform is even worse. If they are going to charge more, at least fix the buggy unreliable platform. 

[bobafett999]

Ok....how would cheap buyers react if they removed the $10 fee, but started charging for posting jobs?