Over the past month, I’ve been encountering pretty much the same problem the OP reported. Since I’ve worked on some Upwork Enterprise contracts in the past, I contacted someone I know who works for Upwork Enterprise itself. She instructed me to post a reply here.
My client onboarding involves sending an initial proposal, doing a consultation, and preparing a detailed quote. It’s probably a more labor-intensive process per client than the OP’s process.
At the end of March, I had 6 leads here who had all reached at least the consultation stage. Here’s what happened:
- One hired me, but I had to email the quote. (Shortly after we started, he had to delay his project due to changing priorities.)
- One wasn’t a good fit for me and hired someone else. I didn’t send a quote.
- One had to delay his project due to changing priorities. I had already sent him a quote.
- The others went completely unresponsive: one after a consultation, one after a second interview, and one after a quote. (I was the only candidate for one of these jobs, which was for a local client and invite-only.)
Two or three of these projects would have been enough to fully book me for April into May. But instead of billing over 160 hours for the month, I billed more like 10. So this has already cost me about a full month’s revenue and counting.
I have actively freelanced here for close to 2.5 years. I’m used to isolated cases of clients going dark, but every client going dark at the same time has never happened to me before this. I knew something was wrong on the Upwork platform side when I went through my old messages during the day on a weekday and all but 3 clients out of over 100 were listed as offline. However, I am still able to use Messages to chat with a longtime client.
The OP seems new here. I’m experiencing this from the opposite angle. I’ve been Top Rated for almost 2 years and still receive invitations to jobs almost every day. Some clients here read my profile and rewrite their job descriptions in response!
But something is going on here that is keeping me from closing deals. If I’m going to continue freelancing full-time, either this needs to be resolved, or I need to stop wasting so much of my lead generation effort on this platform (despite my great reputation and continued positive reviews).
I’ve seen some other Upworkers both here and on Reddit saying that their messages are not reaching their clients. Technically, I think it’s either that, or the clients are not getting notified to check their messages.
What is going on here, and when can I expect it to be resolved? It doesn’t make any sense for me to keep writing proposals if the clients are not going to respond, even if they’re fine with my rate.
