Smart Bidding

[elieorgel]

Today, I saw a new thing on my job proposal - "Smart bidding"
Anyone here saw it?  Apparently it's a new feature (or program).

[petra_r]

Oh no..... Wait for the flood of confused freelancers who angered prospective clients by bidding way outside what the client had in mind and miles away from their profile rate or what they are currently working at... Do you really want a robot to calculate your market-rate based on some dressed up averages? 

And what ARE they thinking conflating hourly rate and fixed price? That's a fixed rate bid on that screenshot... Hourly rate doesn't even come into it?

[wescowley]

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Petra R wrote:

Do you really want a robot to calculate your market-rate based on some dressed up averages? 

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This looks like a prettified version of the mostly useless "suggested bid amount" that sometimes shows up on hourly projects.

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And what ARE they thinking conflating hourly rate and fixed price? That's a fixed rate bid on that screenshot... Hourly rate doesn't even come into it?

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I'm speechless.

Upwork, can you share this article with your devs please? https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211063418-Hourly-vs-Fixed-Price-Projects

[lenaellis]

This should only be displaying on hourly proposals and will not be displayed on fixed-price. We have escalated this to be addressed right away.  

[a_lipsey]

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Lena E wrote:

This should only be displaying on hourly proposals and will not be displayed on fixed-price. We have escalated this to be addressed right away.  

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Let me give you some additional feedback. **Edited for Community Guidelines**  what someone else bids or what they paid someone else. My rate is my rate. My services cost what they cost. 

[gilbert-phyllis]

Oh, that is just a recipe for all kinds of bedlam.

[kochubei_valeria · Accepted solution]

Hi Elie and others,

Thanks for sharing your feedback about Smart Bidding and specifically about the hourly rate showing for fixed-price jobs. This is something we are testing as a newer iteration of the Rate Tip feature. The purpose is to provide freelancers with an overview of how their bidding preferences overlap with the client's activity.

[gilbert-phyllis]

Thanks, Valeria. The main problem I see here (and which I've always suspected was the case with the Rate Tip feature) is that it doesn't account for different types of work a client may have hired. For instance, what if a client has only ever hired admin or data entry support at lower hourly rates and then they need a highly skilled writer or other consultant who bills three or four or five times as much per hour? Or vice versa -- they've hired one or two high-billing writers and now they need admin help. Unless the feature is somehow accounting for this variation, it not only fails to be useful but will likely create confusion and lead less experienced FLs down a rabbithole. At the very least, it's going to annoy the dickens out of many of us.

[wescowley]

After looking at this again, let me add some somewhat less flippant feedback:

I haven't seen this live yet, but based on the screenshot, what it seems to do is take up a fair amount more screen real estate without adding any meaningful information. What do the bars represent? I know it says "frequency", but frequency of what? Why would the client's recent hires, invites, and profile views matter unless we know they are filtered for this specific job type?