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virbox
Community Member

Is it possible to prevent/filter off invites for fixed payment jobs?

Is there a way to warn a client that I will decline fixed jobs invites?

Do clients pay for their invites if they are declined by freelancers because they do not want this type of job (i.e. fixed)?

There is a filter to select hourly jobs only when I look for a job, but I was not able to find a way to prevent clients from sending fixed jobs.

Is there a penalty from Upwork for a freelancer declining too many invites?

One of the reasons I set 'unavailable' status for my profile is that I do not see any way to control what kind of invites the customers send: they may be for jobs with 20+ offers by the time of inivite or with suggested rate lower than my posted rates or out of my skills or preferences.

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petra_r
Community Member


Oleksii G wrote:

Is there a way to warn a client that I will decline fixed jobs invites?


Why do you decline them rather than negotiating for hourly instead?

 


Oleksii G wrote:

Is there a penalty from Upwork for a freelancer declining too many invites?


No.

 


Oleksii G wrote:

One of the reasons I set 'unavailable' status for my profile is that I do not see any way to control what kind of invites the customers send: they may be for jobs with 20+ offers by the time of inivite or with suggested rate lower than my posted rates or out of my skills or preferences.


What is the problem? Invites don't cost you anything and you can always counter-offer when it comes to the contract type or the rate. 

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petra_r
Community Member


Oleksii G wrote:

Is there a way to warn a client that I will decline fixed jobs invites?


Why do you decline them rather than negotiating for hourly instead?

 


Oleksii G wrote:

Is there a penalty from Upwork for a freelancer declining too many invites?


No.

 


Oleksii G wrote:

One of the reasons I set 'unavailable' status for my profile is that I do not see any way to control what kind of invites the customers send: they may be for jobs with 20+ offers by the time of inivite or with suggested rate lower than my posted rates or out of my skills or preferences.


What is the problem? Invites don't cost you anything and you can always counter-offer when it comes to the contract type or the rate. 

virbox
Community Member

Thank you Petra

Why do you decline them rather than negotiating for hourly instead?

The above confirms there is no filter.

Regarding negotiating, it is counter-productive. Clients with fixed price expectations do agree to change the type of contract, but because they created their job with a fixed price in mind, they want to get an assessment on how many hours the job will take and they want a freelancer to commit to that number of hours, which makes this job hourly only formally, while it is really a fixed job despite the 'hourly' status. Precise assessment of hours beforehand is not possible in 90% cases of invites because such an assessment can only be done if you have done exactly the same job multiple times in the past, and a developer can only find a highly matching job through job search, but the invites are only loose matches

lucioric
Community Member

I aggree with the reason of the thread. Much fixed-price clients seem to not understand the complexity of the coding, and their projects seems good for a side activity for developers that have also a traditional job, but not for making a living. At least me, I have not found the way to make a living with fixed-price projects. I prefr the hourly ones. Does anyone found a way to make a living with fixed price projects?.

lucioric
Community Member

Like a year ago, I started to apply to hourly jobs (and to mention in threads that I prefered hourly jobs), and with the time I started to get more invitations for hourly jobs (or would be the pandemics work style shift?). I accepted more hourly jobs invitations than fixed-price ones, and then I got an ever higher hourly/fixed-price invites ratio. The system is intelligent and learns from the jobs that you decline and I think that it also learns from the jobs that you accept. And, when you decline fixed price projects, select the proposed budget or rate too low reason. Then it appears as a reason for declining the invitation project, specially when the price is really low.

If you track your time, fixed price jobs can always be translated to an hourly rate after the job is done.

Customers don't want to be overcharged and generally understand that Freelancers don't want to be under paid either. They can be informed that we don't want to compromise quality to meet their budget, and that's an important reason to avoid fixed price contracts. I don't even want to see invitations with a low fixed price and consider them to be spam. An option to eliminate receiving them would be a welcome improvement.

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