Client offer

[benfsmom]

Does anyone have comments/information regarding the client who wants to pay $2.00 for 450-word articles? By their own guidelines, it should only take 1.5 hours to complete such an article, including research. This means $1.35 per hour, not including Upwork fees. Is this in keeping with the TOS for clients?

[prestonhunter]

Lorraine:

Fixed-price contracts are (by definition) not defined by time.

They are defined by deliverables.

$2.00 for a 450-word is certainly too much to pay for the level of quality that many Upwork writers produce. But it is certainly a reasonable amount for some freelancers' work.

And I'm certain that there are many Upwork writers whose skills and experience are such that they can demand more than that.

Upwork's minimum fixed-price contract amount is $5.00.

So if a client sets up a contract for 3 articles, with a payout of $6.00, this would be in keeping with Upwork ToS.

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Lorraine,

Upwork has an official minimum hourly rate of $3/hour and minimum budget of $5 for fixed-price jobs. The client won't be able to set up a contract with a rate or budget lower than that. Beyond that, the freelancer and the client are free to negotiate rates, budgets and deadlines between themselves.

[prestonhunter]

I think the original poster might be trying to extrapolate an "hourly rate" based on her own estimations of how long something takes.

If that is something that a person finds interesting or amusing, there's nothing wrong with doing that. But such an exercise has no connection to Upwork ToS.

It reminds me of somethign that happened to me last week. A client was asking me for a fixed-price quote and time estimate for a project. I knew that much of the project would involve communicating with various team members to ask them for their descriptions and defintions of various terms... A lot of communications, email, waiting for responses, etc.

So I told him I estimated I could finish this in 2 weeks.

He asked: "So at 40 hours per week, that means 80 hours total?"

I had to laugh. No... that's not what I meant.