Upwork Rate Tip?

[Jacqueline P]

Maybe I just never noticed this before, but on an hourly job proposal this morning, near where I enter my rate there was this: Upwork Rate Tip: $102.00. Considerably lower than my rate, which I suspect may be so low it's hurting my chances of getting hired ($49). I don't think about it much as I usually do fixed price, not based on hours because I don't think I can know that going in. Just overall sense of what it would be worth to do it. 

Is this new? Does it indicate something Upwork knows about what our rate should be? I finished the proposal at more than I would have bid, but haven't changed my hourly. 

[Joseph C]

I noticed the "Upwork Rate Tip" is always considerably more than I intend to bid.  My current Profile Hourly Rate is $145 and I have billed as much as $195.

Usually the Rate Tip is in excess of $200 an hour.

I just ignore them - no apparent rationale behind them, at least for me.

Joe

[Melissa C]

This has happened to me too. And it's always much higher than I would ever realistically charge.

I sincerely doubt that Upwork knows better than we do what our rates should be.

The odd thing is that this only pops up occasionally on hourly gigs.

I just ignore it. At first I found it flattering until I remembered that Upwork likes to make a lot of money. That might be at the root of this, as it naturally is for any business. I just find it odd that mine, too, have always been either double or triple my rates.

[Mary W]

Interesting.  My rate tip is usually just about my hourly rate.  I think I'm pretty much at the top of what I can realistically charge.  Sigh.

[Richard W]

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Mary W wrote:

Interesting.  My rate tip is usually just about my hourly rate.  I think I'm pretty much at the top of what I can realistically charge.  Sigh.

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Me too. When I started on Upwork my profile rate was $25, and I got a lot of rate tips in the $30-40 range. Now that my rate is $40 I very rarely get a rate tip, and then it's only about $42.

[Jess C]

As far as I know the client doesn't see this oh-so-helpful "tip" - it's just Upwork's way of trying to make more money. It's always ridiculously high for me when it pops up, like triple what I would ever charge, so I ignore it and fill in my regular hourly.

Edit to add, this thread has some discussion of the rate tip as well, and that it doesn't come up on every job but zeroes out your default profile rate when it does. (Though it took mods more than a month to confirm that behavior was working "as designed...")

[Bill H]

I've never gotten a rate tip, probably because the algorithms are afraid of me. I read UW's description of "expert," and learned that an "expert:" is someone who charges more than $18/hr. I'm an expert, and wouldn't snore for $18/hr.

[Flavio S]

Why I don't see my rate tip? It doesn't show when I apply for hourly jobs

[Jennifer M]

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Flavio S wrote:

Why I don't see my rate tip? It doesn't show when I apply for hourly jobs

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From my experience and if I am picking up what Upwork is throwing down, you get a rate tip if the job can be matched with a lookup and your rate is much lower than what they think it should be. If I was a bettin man, I would guess they are pulling from Indeed or Glassdoor. I got a rate tip for $190/hour once, and as much as I'd like to think I'm really that ferkin awesome, I don't think that was quite right.

[Gary Val T]

Flavio - Doesn't matter if you don't see a rate tip. Whatever the "tip" might be, you can pretty much rest assured that regardless of how great you are at whatever it is you do, it would be so ridiculously high that the liklihood of any client hiring you for that amount of money is slim (and that's an understatement) to none.