Automated Bidding Products (Gigradar.io, Upboost.ai)

[f8a70a95]

Automated Bidding Products (Gigradar.io, Upboost.ai) allow the freelancer/agency to bid on new jobs 24/7 without any manual intervention. You can define one or multiple job proposal templates, and your bidding strategy and then simply let the tool do the job for you. The only limited factor is the amount of money you want to spend on connects. 

The Upwork API, which allows programmatic access to certain interactions with the website does not allow one to submit proposals and do bidding. The Upwork Terms of Use (3.5 ) state it is forbidden to:

• use a robot, spider, scraper, or similar mechanisms on our site without written permission
• access our services through any technology other than our interface

These tools work by using a software program (robot, bot) that can simulate user interactions on Upworks, such as clicking buttons and navigating between pages. These programs are usually detected by Upwork and result in a ban for the user, but if you hide the fact that a program doing those actions well enough, your bot may be able to stay undetected.

On my LinkedIn Network I had someone advertise for such a product openly. I asked this person if they are aware that this is against the terms of use on Upwork and that their customers could receive a ban for using them. 
They invited me to a video meeting to understand the tool better. Appereantly they have a system in place that makes it safe for the users:
They actively work together with Upwork to avoid anything happening to the accounts that do the robo-bidding with their tool. They have over 400 clients, mostly large agencies, some generating millions of dollars revenue and spending thousands of dollars on connects with their excessive bidding. They only use replacable 'business-manager' accounts for the bidding, so in case something goes wrong, they can simply replace the account with a new one. In the worst case, the business manager account gets banned but never the agency itselve. And by communicating with Upwork they simply unban those accounts again. (I assume they simply send an email to Upwork stating that they were not using a robot, but simply made a lot of proposals manually. But there could be more behind this ... ) 
They claim they are actively being supported by Upwork behind the scenes, but I have no proof for that and I don't want to believe it. 

These tools give agencies and freelancer who use them an unfair advantage and the owners profit from exploiting loopholes in Upwork's banning system. I was quoted 400$ per month for this software.
I worry that these tools will be the standard, and a necessity for anyone who wants to be successful on Upwork. 

How will Upwork take care of this and stay a fair marketplace?  

Attached: Email Conversation with Gigrader Sales

[alexandernovikov]

What's the point of this apart from waste of connects, if the messages aren't specialised/targeted anyway? It costs barely more than $399 a month to employ a human-bot who will monitor feed and copy-paste useless spam manually, for about same result - probably no result at all.

[f8a70a95]

You can define different templates for different types of post with Gigradar. And you could also just use a smarter A.I to also make really good non-generic proposals. I am sure other tools do that. 
But even with a generic post, this gives a huge advantage. It doesn't matter if the success rate is lower. You can send thousands of proposals per day. And you will be always among the first ones the client sees.

[alexandernovikov]

What's the value of thousands of unboosted proposals per day? They will all become invisible as soon as more than 4 people are using this :). And thousands of boosted ones will be too expensive in connect costs. In any case, real business comes from invitations, and invitations come when there is a high *reply rate* on proposals. Someone using that **bleep** is just shooting themselves in the foot for their own money, even if they won't get banned.

I made millions here and i bid on projects after many days of their posting, and never do more than ~100 bids per MONTH, sometimes as little as 20 per month.

[alexandernovikov]

People with Latin American names but address in Ukraine, in a residential address... now that truly smells like SCAM. We really need to raise awareness of Upwork support so this "startup" gets gutted ASAP.

[celgins]

Definitely scam material. And because they are so prolific, I'm sure Upwork already knows about them and has tracked their movements across the marketplace.

The question is, can Upwork stop them from making a mockery of the freelancer bidding process.

[alexandernovikov]

Sadly, they are going to do what most other "startups" do this day: get some money from the gullible and the desperate ones, damaging their lives in the process, then ride into sunset. Sad, as Trump would say.

[596db271]

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[sajal36]

I believe if this come out true than surely this is unfair bidding process for other freelancer. End of the day it will depends on clients on how they shortlist the proposal.

[lysis10]

I wouldn't call it unfair. I think it's more like you will be a big blur in a sea of the same bids if you do this. Also, there was a guy on reddit automating bids (1000 in a day) and got banned, but he claimed to be making $35k per month so I kinda wonder if he got banned for account sharing not the automation.

The problem is that nobody would admit to getting banned for automation like this, so you have no idea how many accounts have been killed for doing this. You just get the infamous NO REASON.