Platform Review: Why I Will No Longer Use Freelancer.com
- March 18, 2019
- By Tatoru Yuki
- 0 Comments
Update: 3 days after this post is uploaded, Freelancer.com support team has reached out to me with the following response. It looks like their staff do try to clear disputes with dissatisfied users like me or other freelancers. This message clearly entails what users should be looking out for before they bid on projects or how they can communicate with the buyer more before they accept that job and get charged either $5 or 10%, whichever is higher. You can refer to their response below. I have censored the staff name, ticket URL and my own name for privacy purposes.
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Now that you have read their response, take my reviews and content with a bit of salt if you will. Just know that this is my personal experience and I am basing my reviews on my experience using this website to work as a freelancer.If you have been following my blog for a bit, you might have seen some other blog posts about scams at Freelancer.com and other issues.
I also have a blog that was made just to single out some of the scammers that are using Freelancer.com. You can find the blog here if you are interested.
Freelancer.com Is Not Worth It :(
I have tried several freelancing platforms, including Fiverr, PeoplePerHour and Guru.com. Freelancer.com was probably the first one that I tried, simply because the name was easy to find.
I was happily using the 1-month pro-account free trial and bidding on all sorts of projects, but I can assure you that at least 50% of the bids I placed were gone to waste.
I was happily using the 1-month pro-account free trial and bidding on all sorts of projects, but I can assure you that at least 50% of the bids I placed were gone to waste.
Reasons to Say No to Freelancer.com No. 1: High Project Cost
There was one project that I managed to get around the first few days that I was on the site. It was a transcription project, I remember that much. I bid SGD155 for that project, and the client was happy with that price.
We talked a little, and I chose to accept the project.
Of course I was thrilled to have that project. It was barely a week in and I already managed to get a high-price one.
Then, the moment I clicked the 'Accept' button, I got charged.
My cash wallet took a negative dive even before I managed to earn a single cent.
My balance was a whooping -SGD15.50.
Freelancer.com Took a 10% Project Fee from Me
Well that was really shitty, isn't it? 10%? For real?
As it turns out, the client who couldn't speak or understand Mandarin or other dialects misinformed me about the audio clip. While I was told that the audio clip is mostly English and Chinese with a bit of Hokkien, the entire audio clip was 90% angry, cursing Hokkien that was too fast to comprehend.
So I told him that I couldn't do it, and canceled the assignment.
There was No Refund After Project Cancellation
I had to use the earnings that I gained from the next few projects to get my wallet back to positive and earning values.
There was no refund of project fee even after the project has been canceled. That had me wondering. What if there were clients who were scamming freelancers? If we later on noticed that the project didn't make sense or we wanted to stop the collaborations, we as the freelancers would still be charged the non-refundable project fee.
Not very fair, is it?
That brings me to my second point.
Reasons to Say No to Freelancer.com No. 2: Plenty of Scam Jobs
Here's a tip if you're looking to find money at Freelancer.com. Don't apply for jobs that look sketchy. I'm talking about tasks like 'need to type PDF into word', 'copy typing job' and generally jobs that look like this:
I just logged in to the platform and checked the most recent uploaded project, and there's one right there. It's so easy to find and spot the scam jobs once you have been there for a few days!
Note that the employer has 0 verification. They are not a verified member, no payment verification, no email, phone number or any other form of verification at all.
The project profit looks absolutely delicious. I would love to type images into words and get paid anywhere in between USD250 - USD750.
But come on. Let's be real.
There's no way you can earn that much by just copytyping, foreign language or not. Find me one single job with payment receipts where you have earned USD250 from if you want to prove me wrong.
Scammers are everywhere on this site. Spammy projects that keep getting reposted every 10 minutes by different new profiles, clients who start chatting with you only to start with something that goes like the screenshots below:
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| Hi.Thanks for applying to my job. So it works like this. I hire you and when we start, I send a topic and you do within 2hrs max and send back and I give you another . So it's like that until we do 5 articles daily, 5-6 days a week. okay? As you work , you track your time with time tracker for secured payment. Can you work like that? If so add me on skype at seowriterneeded so I hire you and we start. Thanks |
The person from the second screenshot is still actively scamming people with the same Skype handle. I wrote almost USD200 worth of work and did not receive any payments.
Looks like the Secure Payments and Payment Verifications Can Be Removed
Here's what happened. When you track your work hourly, the payments are logged on Freelancer platform. You then get paid according to the hourly rates you agreed on.
The money will get released automatically from the client's side at certain days of the week.
Sounds secure, doesn't it?
That's what I thought too. I mean, I had projects afterwards that actually really worked that way and I got my money like clockwork. But for this scam client...
The client later blocked me on Freelancer.com and removed his credit card verification status so that his payments no longer go through automatically.
I immediately contacted the client of course, only to find out that he already blocked me in advance. I talked to the Freelancer.com support team about this issue immediately.
That's what the support team is for, right?
Less Than Optimal Help & Protection for Freelancers
"Please help me get my money. The client actually blocked me and my secure payments were canceled. How did that happen? Does you website actually protect freelancers? If clients can just remove their secure payments and credit card verifications, then our clients can just run away scot-free without paying us isn't it? All they have to do is to remove their credit card details, block us, and that's it!"
Their responses were something along the lines of , "We're sorry this happened. Please be careful when choosing a client to work with in the future. We have closed the client's account to avoid them from scamming other freelancers."
Well, great. They just removed the only way I can get my money from the client - by deleting the profile. Niiiiiiice. Awesome.
Not only did they enable the client to get away with removing what is supposed to be our safeguarded payments, they also remove the client from their platform so that nothing can be done. They didn't try to contact the client for me or anything. Just removed the account.
Reasons to Say No to Freelancer.com No. 3: Other Project Fees
On PeoplePerHour.com, users who invite clients to hire them on that platform will not get any project fees or anything. You can get away with 0 project fee if they hire you first!
That is not the case for Freelancer.com
Even for my hourly project tracking assignments, they still take 10%/
Every assignment milestone, every hourly bid projects will take 10% away from you.
Essentially, when you are giving your bidding prices to your clients, you will need to charge them a little extra.
I usually charge USD20 for every 1000 words. But because I want to get this same amount once I get paid, I need to charge at least USD22. Freelancer.com even made it more convenient for you to charge them extra by automatically adding the 10% into each milestone, hourly rates and project bids you put on the project that you are interested in.
Not exactly the best for the client either, isn't it?
Even when clients directly go to my profile and offer me a project, I look at the price and go, "Hmm.. Cool, cool. USD20 for 1000 words. That's exactly my current rate! I can deal with this."
I accepted the project, and I was charged USD5.42.
Do we actually get charged a little more when we get approached directly?
Here's the best part. The amount was automatically deducted straight from my PayPal account. I only knew that I actually had my balances (that was just the exact amount I saved for a monthly recurring payment) directly deducted when I received an email about it. There's even a nice little invoice from Freelancer.com!
So quick to automatically charge my PayPal account for project fees, yet unable to secure a scammer client's credit card payments?
Interesting. Indeed, interesting.
There isn't even an incremental system thing that decreases the project fees taken from you once you reached a certain seller level. Even if there is, I can guarantee you that it's going to be a form of paid membership.
You pay to get paid more. Hah.
What I Suggest:
Create your own blog or one-pager portfolio on any of those free blogging websites. Write about the services you provide over there and promote it on Facebook or something.
Fiverr, PeoplePerHour etc are a lot better in terms of how they charge freelancers and how they protect them as well.
Don't make the same mistakes I did!
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