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rakib39
Community Member

Do you think clients are leaving upwork due to recent policies?

I see a lot less job post now a days and I was wondering if clients are leaving upwork for the recent policy changes in upwork!
Please leave your thoughts.
Do you think it’s true? Is it just me?
22 REPLIES 22
nazsaghir
Community Member

I'm not much sure about the clients leaving but yes I'm not getting invitations and hire on jobs. 

i think clients are leaving.....there is no point clients will go for expensive memberships...how can you expect  clients to buy membership worth $500 just for sake of sending unlimited invitations and few other features ..

 

and irony is  clients budgets are going down like anything and upwork has raised the cost for membership

kristenbrady
Community Member

I think Upwork allows too many people to bid on a job. They should do it like Thumbtack where only 5 people are allowed to bid on a project and the client gets to pick from those 5. Especially if we are using 6 connects to bid on a job. I've been on here for 10 years and it's next to impossible for me to find work because of the sheer fierce competition on this site. 

I think it was a mistake to make the changes at the time of year when projects usually decrease in number anyway. It's led to people assuming that the changes alone are responsible for the drop in listings.

@Kristen B, what will happen if no one is actually qualified enough for the job? I don't think that's a solution to this particular problem.


Kristen B wrote:

I think Upwork allows too many people to bid on a job. They should do it like Thumbtack where only 5 people are allowed to bid on a project and the client gets to pick from those 5. Especially if we are using 6 connects to bid on a job. I've been on here for 10 years and it's next to impossible for me to find work because of the sheer fierce competition on this site. 


Why on earth would you want to limit clients to seeing only the least employable freelancers? How long do you think they'll stay on the site when the only bids they're allowed to get are from brand new or very low-end freelancers who are sitting around staring at their job feeds because they don't have any work?

Hello, if the competition is strong and more for new members who have no reputation yet, on some occasions and seen up to 200 applicants for 1 job offer, in the time I have been on the platform alone and achieved 1 job, currently waiting for my connections resume to try again

joe-niland
Community Member

I don't think the new Client plans should be a factor. You can still post a job for free and send 3 invites so it's not that different in that respect.


Joe N wrote:

I don't think the new Client plans should be a factor. You can still post a job for free and send 3 invites so it's not that different in that respect.


It is not just the number of invites, it is losing all the reports, the ability to pay with different payment methods, the ability to have teams, activity codes etc.

Yes, clients are leaving. Fact.

 

Yes, this time the changes are drastic. I guess they are trying to weed out small budget clients, but doing that they are somehow increasing the number of freelancers looking for jobs. The paid connects will make the freelancers number go down too, but if not... sooner or later there will be more changes, to make a difference. Otherwise clients will not see any advantages staying here. It makes sense that clients don't like start paying for services that previously had for free and that other platforms are still offering for free.


Sergio S wrote:

Yes, this time the changes are drastic. I guess they are trying to weed out small budget clients, but doing that they are somehow increasing the number of freelancers looking for jobs. The paid connects will make the freelancers number go down too, but if not... sooner or later there will be more changes, to make a difference. Otherwise clients will not see any advantages staying here. It makes sense that clients don't like start paying for services that previously had for free and that other platforms are still offering for free.


I could be wrong, but I don't think they're very interested in keeping small/individual clients, even if they pay well. I think all of these changes are moving us in a direction where most or all clients will be along the lines of current Enterprise clients. If I'm right, everything will eventually wash out in the middle--the lowest-end freelancers are (theoretically, at least) being eliminated now, but the highest-end freelancers won't likely find work here, either.


Tiffany S wrote:

If I'm right, everything will eventually wash out in the middle--the lowest-end freelancers are (theoretically, at least) being eliminated now, but the highest-end freelancers won't likely find work here, either.

This may happened indeed if they turn into a temps agency selling remote employees and offering scalability to major accounts. We may be witnessing the last months of Upwork being a freelancer platform.

 

 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless


Tiffany S wrote:

If I'm right, everything will eventually wash out in the middle--the lowest-end freelancers are (theoretically, at least) being eliminated now, but the highest-end freelancers won't likely find work here, either.

People keep saying that it's not profitable to keep the low-end freelancers and that Upwork is trying to eliminate them, but if that's the case, I wish they'd just go ahead and bump up the minimum rate above $3/hour. Wouldn't that solve the problem a lot faster and more effectively? 

 

And yes, it does seem like they're trying to eliminate the smaller clients, which is bad news for me. I'm quite happy to have about 15 "small" clients through Upwork who hire me 3-4 times a year, but they're definitely not the sort of people who would pay a $25 membership fee, let alone $500.


Christine A wrote:

Tiffany S wrote:

If I'm right, everything will eventually wash out in the middle--the lowest-end freelancers are (theoretically, at least) being eliminated now, but the highest-end freelancers won't likely find work here, either.

People keep saying that it's not profitable to keep the low-end freelancers and that Upwork is trying to eliminate them, but if that's the case, I wish they'd just go ahead and bump up the minimum rate above $3/hour. Wouldn't that solve the problem a lot faster and more effectively? 

 

That's been raised often and Upwork never responds. I'm just guessing, but I suspect that the reason they don't do it that way is it's just too hard to create a structure that does that effectively. There are already people circumventing the $3 restriction by agreeing on a fixed price contract to work 25 hours/week for $50 and that sort of thing. There are so many ways clients and freelancers could work together to evade that type of restriction, and many of them would end up creating extra work for Upwork staff.

At this point (under my theory), it would be pointless to do that anyway, since I expect much bigger changes in the works, and think this is part of a step-by-step shift.

 

And yes, it does seem like they're trying to eliminate the smaller clients, which is bad news for me. I'm quite happy to have about 15 "small" clients through Upwork who hire me 3-4 times a year, but they're definitely not the sort of people who would pay a $25 membership fee, let alone $500.


If they're ongoing clients, it may be workable to just keep working with them over time. But, I'm not optimistic that Upwork will be a friendly place for smaller clients to shop for freelancers moving forward. And I should be clear that when I say "small," in this context, I'm including clients who may be spending $100,000/year through Upwork, not just the ones doing a $1,000 job every few months or a bunch of $100 jobs.

Upwork should provide more opportunities to all type of clients. While other platforms offering a wide range of acceptable payment methods, running campaigns to bring in new clients, I don't know if upwork doing the same!


Christine A wrote:

Tiffany S wrote:

If I'm right, everything will eventually wash out in the middle--the lowest-end freelancers are (theoretically, at least) being eliminated now, but the highest-end freelancers won't likely find work here, either.

People keep saying that it's not profitable to keep the low-end freelancers and that Upwork is trying to eliminate them, but if that's the case, I wish they'd just go ahead and bump up the minimum rate above $3/hour. Wouldn't that solve the problem a lot faster and more effectively? 


Not really... Huge clients who hire hundreds of low cost freelancers for thousands of hours of ongoing work would be affected.


Petra R wrote:

Christine A wrote:


People keep saying that it's not profitable to keep the low-end freelancers and that Upwork is trying to eliminate them, but if that's the case, I wish they'd just go ahead and bump up the minimum rate above $3/hour. Wouldn't that solve the problem a lot faster and more effectively? 


Not really... Huge clients who hire hundreds of low cost freelancers for thousands of hours of ongoing work would be affected.


I believe the $3 "maximum minimum," as it were, was effectively dictated by those clients as a condition of contracting with Upwork. I have also heard that profit margins are thin at that end of the market—which would make sense if high-dollar Enterprise clients were also penny-pinchers (who nonetheless might be willing to drop another $6K per year as an explicit account service fee to Upwork).

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can comment.

I hope I'm wrong ... but I think Tiffany's sense of reality is correct.  "If they're ongoing clients, it may be workable to just keep working with them over time. But, I'm not optimistic that Upwork will be a friendly place for smaller clients to shop for freelancers moving forward. And I should be clear that when I say "small," in this context, I'm including clients who may be spending $100,000/year through Upwork, not just the ones doing a $1,000 job every few months or a bunch of $100 jobs."

 

And that will have a major impact on most of us who earn a chunk of our income via U.


Petra R wrote:

 
Not really... Huge clients who hire hundreds of low cost freelancers for thousands of hours of ongoing work would be affected.

If they're such huge clients, then they could afford $5 an hour instead of $3. Anyway, if Upwork wants to hang onto these clients so badly, then aren't they shooting themselves in the foot by scaring off low-charging freelancers with the new connects plan? Clients who want to hire cheap freelancers will have a much smaller pool to choose from. 

 

6782035e
Community Member

I am not a small client of upwork. we probably spent between 50'000 and 100'000 usd on upwork already.

 

now we have only 5 invites per job, which is not enough to find the talent we need, so yes, we have already opened accounts on other freelancing sites, and most likely have to hire from there from now on. it is a shame, the greed destroys upwork.

 

we are not gonna pay 500 usd per month to get unlimited invites back.

petra_r
Community Member


Christoph M wrote:

 

now we have only 5 invites per job,

we are not gonna pay 500 usd per month to get unlimited invites back.


You don't have to. On the Plus plan for $ 50 a month you have 15 invites per job post.

Most quality freelancers dismiss spam invites (where masses of freelancers are invited.)

My personal pain-point is 10

6782035e
Community Member

I think I had 7 or 8 invites for the Job I posted (full time work) - Because it was classified as a special project (default for a job is 5 Invites I think).

From this 7 or 8 invites, 1 accepted it, and refered us to a friend of his, because he had not time for a big project.

So as you can see, 15 invites will not help. We need at least 30-40 Invites to find somebody for longtime work (bigger projects).

15 might be enough for small jobs to find a good freelancer, but for big projects and longtime work it is just not enough - most freelancers can not accept big projects.

That's exactly the problem with the new system - it will be enough for small jobs to find somebody that has time, but it is not enough to find somebody for a bigger project. - And Upwork tries to pressure us to buy the unlimited invites plan to solve this artificial problem they have created to make more money.

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