There is no 'best' freelance site, nor is there a need to build a 'better' freelance website. Just use REGULAR job sites like indeed, stackoverflow, monsterjobs, glassdoor, dribble jobs, linkedin jobs, weworkremotely, remoteok.io and search specifically for part time, temporary, and contract. No fees to apply, no fees taken from your pay, no clauses preventing you from getting contact information.
@Joshua Fluke Love your content and value you provide to people and can understand your viewpoint on Upwork. Don't let other peoples views ever stop you from posting your videos or viewpoints,. I love reading all the threads on here of people's experiences and seeing what other people are doing to get jobs. I will say that I felt the same way initially about upwork policies, but I have grown to understand the verbiage and nuances of their policies and what upwork does to enforce it. As someone who has over 300K in projects on upwork I've run into virtually every conceivable situation with clients and projects and pushed the bounds of Upwork's policies. I will say that in the beginning when I didn't know completely of all their policies or their enforcement of their policies, that I asked a client to pay via paypal for $500 on their chat (which they monitor for red flags). Client made that payment. However Upwork pretty quickly detected that message and did a temporary suspension of some sort (not a full suspension) of my account and clients account and gave us both a warning not to do that again and forced us to respond that we understood and not do it again. I didn't like how that played out, but kept working on their platform, because the leads and projects kept coming in. You are allowed to talk to clients off their network however Upwork does strongly recommend that you keep conversations on their network. I have all my client's emails and contact info and vice-versa. It's just a big no no to get caught receiving payments off their platform. I typically will start out having all conversations on upwork's platform, but slowly switch it over to emails or skype. In my job proposal bids I put in my phone number and skype and haven't had any issues. Also if a client even mentions making payment via some other source via Upwork's messaging system I always tell the client to not do that as it's against Upwork's policies and that they are monitoring the chat. Client then responds back that they understand. There were times where a client had a laugh about it by saying in the chat "Upwork if you are listening we will be paying only through your platform." Anyways It can be good if we have an unbiased 3rd party monitoring business chats in case of abuse or dispute later on that I can reference. So its not all policing of policy. I've had a situation on a project where client didn't want to release final payment after a project was complete. Their money was in Upwork's escrow. Thankfully I had all conversations on their network to reference in case of a dispute (I haven't gone through the dispute process but was very close on this instance). Upwork helped through that process of mediating and client eventually agreed to release payment before going to arbitration. I knew he was bluffing (BTW there is a $300 for each party and for Upwork to go to a third party arbitration service and client's usually do not want to pay for that to recover money in escrow). I had also another issue where a client was trying to scam me to do work and kept asking me to do more work quickly. I put my hours through upwork for one week and that looked like it went through. There was some issue with client's account and he got suspended. It looked like client was logging in from different countries and creating multiple accounts. Anyways it was a $1000 worth of work for the first week that looked like it went through, but client did a charge back on it. Long story short, Upwork still paid me the $1,000 and took the loss for it. So there's a positive there. Anyways I could go on and on about Upwork stories. There is good and bad. I do have empathy for new users on Upwork as they have to build up to get going which I understand is a huge issue for you. Anyways for the most part now Upwork leaves me alone. I guess I have made them a ton of money and I also have made a ton of money so it's win/win. I don't charge $60-$100/hr like other people claim on here. I suppose I can go higher on my rate, but when getting new clients I will keep it competitive. Overall in my opinion I think Upwork has setup their policies to help both sides. They also do it to help with their marketing to get clients to post their jobs and use their platform. They advertise that client's can keep track of freelancers etc. etc., and pay for only approved work etc, etc. but in reality thats only partially true. I don't use their time tracker application which takes screenshots as I am against that and the way that client pays only for approved work is by disputing hours or budgets after the work is done ( there is a week period after I submit my hours for client to dispute it after that they cannot dispute it). This marketing however is somewhat true and is an incentive to get clients to use their platform and a way for clients to feel confident to post a job. Since there are a lot of bad/inexperienced freelancers out there so more business comes to me as a result so I try to get to clients before some other freelancer gets to them. Anyways I think its important with some clients that money is stored in an escrow just to build on some trust as there is a lot of scammers out there on both sides. Their platform is not perfect, but it works for me and for others as well as for clients. I also think there is less of a chance for a client to get out of line (although they still do) since there is a perception that the freelancer is protected to some degree by the platform (I would say there is a little bit of protection, which I will bring up in case there is issues with the client). One last thing I have to say about looking for jobs on indeed is that there really isn't any reputation that the client can look up while there is on Upwork. That can lead to interviews where you have to jump through hoops and tests to get the contract or job. Not to say that doesn't happen on upwork, but I can just win over the client by selling myself and showing reputation on upwork and not having to go through all these tests. I'm not looking to get hired full time. Just want to work on the project and get it done and support it if clients want support.
Thanks, the costs of connects is a big deal once it piles up, remember not all countries have pounds, euros or dollars as a currency, some countries need to shelve 50 local-currency to convert for 1 dollar, and some countries have 55 local-currency minimum wage for a full time job. Agencies or contractless jobs pay even lower. People often overlook how "cheap" 1 dollar can be, but often overlook they're the top 3 with the biggest exchange rates. Yeah it's 1 dollar but it's 1 wage hour in my country. We're not exactly poor but that's no reason not to be frugal right?
If that person that was banned from up work was from Europe, up work is legally required to expose the data they have on the user. Including any "reports" that they supposibly have to keep "private" from the user
Programming Addict Addict kinda felt it was bait-n-switch. wanted an excuse to hate upwork. while i agree with josh on just about everything, this is not one. (don’t don’t read that in josh’s middle management voice)
@@writegoodcode815 Yeah I see your point. He does deliver this info about the websites like it's the worst thing in the world, but he still puts out valuable information - that all these websites try to lock you down so they can take the piece of the pie, and if they're your only source of income they hold your well being since they can just ban you for no reason. For Josh, it seems that this is unacceptable and that's I think why he delivered it the way he did, but it's good to be at least aware of what you're getting yourself into if you decide to go that route
I would say more like a university, you pay for the classes, for each test, and the semester. And in the end you don't really feel like you achieved anything.
I love when people say "it's a private company they can do what they want, if you don't like the TOS, don't agree to it and don't use their service". Here's the thing, many companies write in the TOS that they can change the terms at anytime without notifying you. They treat it like a contract but how many contracts do you know that allows one party to change the terms at anytime without notifying the other party? The answer, none, because that's not a contract. So they shouldn't be allowed to hold you financially liable for violating their little rules. It's complete and utter bullshit.
Of course UW has to (and does) inform clients of changes, and they usually will give you a period of time where you can explicitly not agree to the changes in which case usually you will leave the contract (close your account in this case), I do not know where you got that information. From many comments here I see that people are mad at Upwork for not making them tons of money or not fast enough, or for other reasons that they themselves are responsible for. It is all that "the teacher does not like me" mentality...
@@effexon Not even remotely similar, uber has people doing a very particular thing, while upwork is just a marketplace where supply and demand meet in many different forms. Personally, I paid over 1500 USD to Upwork in fees last year and I do not regret one cent of that, I do not have to care about marketing or a website or portfolio, it all happens naturally.
Hey man, I feel like you're one of the few RUclipsrs that has been honest and open to their channel since day one. I am a new kid in front-end programming whose leaving the military for a new adventure and starting over. You're one of the few I can relate. Keep making awesome contents.
If you make Upwork as your main source of income, you will have a hard time. But if you make it secondary and still have a full-time job, it will do wonders.
Last job I applied costed me 21 connects. It is now waaay more expensive. And the clients won’t even look the proposals, keep them there until they expire and the connects won’t be refounded. I bought 100 connects these days, I’m top rated freelancer, now I’m almost running out of connects and I haven’t had one single aplicantion reviewd by a client.
Not true I've tried online poker and freelancer. I got good money from one side and on the other people were trying to use me like garbage giving me extra duties or leave bad rating and couldn't got a lot chances. So casinos are nicer.
If a company ever bans you without reason. Demand full information from your account as per GDPR. They don't reply within 30 days, report them. They will be fined.
@@TatharNuar Pretty sure that GDPR holds as long as a company is serving their service in an EU country. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even Google, which is an American company, has to comply to GDPR since they are serving users in the EU. Now, if you don't live in the EU you obviously can't use the GDPR since, well, you're not European. Might be mistaken, if I am please enlighten me, laws aren't written in a way such that normal people can understand them.
even if they do reply, how can we tell if they are providing complete and accurate information? What if they just cook something up to make themselves look good while hiding more important information in their servers?
I made a Fiverr account a few months ago. In those few months I got about 30 fake job requests from 1 day old accounts that were banned the next day. Then they turned off my account for not accepting any of the offers. Good times.
My experience with fiverr wasn't much better. How it can work for anyone, I don't know, but I guess the owners of fiverr are making $$. I don't wish to be a "donor".
That is a legit tactic to keep the competition in a niche down. It has worked so well that they have even torpedoed level 2 seller accounts. It was removed from a sub reddit i was surfing but the basic premise was. Outsource the scheme to india or china....have them make throw away accounts on fiverr.... flood the new/level 1 sellers in your niche with fake job requests. Sit back and watch Fiverr take out your competition.
@@patientlyunaccountable6805 A lot of freelancers are from there that's why most banned are from there. But they ban people from other countries as well and for ridiculous reason - if clients do not accept your proposals for a long time, you can be banned. But we all understand that clients refuse if you are charging more than others. Which means this policy leads to lower bids and this looks super-stupid to me. If company takes percentage, they should be interested in higher prices, not lower.
I recently had something shitty on Upworks. I’m a pop culture writer, and there was a listing asking for an article titled “5 amazing facts about rockstars.” I applied to the job, then the job poster messaged me and asked “what are the 5 facts?” I then responded with 5 facts about rockstars, and then job poster never responded. This makes me think that they just used my facts and used them to write content for their own content . I also saw that they had completed 5 to 10 interviews for that same job, so it potentially means he got 5 facts from each of them. So that’s some fun bullshit to add to the list of shitty things about upworks. The job posters might just be using the platform to get content out of freelancers through interview questions and/or writing tests.
Perhaps a reason to feed them content that is (subtly) incorrect and/or internally logically inconsistent (they probably don't understand it if they are just collectors)? That can be fixed later during editing/touch-up.
thomas samson - I thought that was the “interview” portion of our interaction. But that’s not the point, the point is that I’m a freelancer desperate to grow my portfolio and many people on Upwork want to take advantage.
SquishyCandyftw - I agree that working for free is never ideal. But I live in NYC and it’s nearly impossible to get any entry level experience without taking non-paying internships. It’s wrong and shouldn’t be the norm, but that’s just how it is out here.
This channel is so underrated! These days too many tech channels capitalize on “baseless optimism” like many universities and the fact that you keep it real makes this channel instantly stand out. Upwork, Fiverr, or office Jobs all have one thing in common. No one wants to be the first everyone wants prior experience. Find someone extremely knowledgeable in their field and pay them shit. You can end up a broke freelancer much like an unemployed DBA or Sec Analyst or Dev. The fact that people still buy that there is a “shortage” of skilled pros is simply unbelievable. I feel bad for all these kids with bachelors, CompTIA/Cisco certs, countless hours spent on Udemy, home labs, github projects etc. who will have to pick up a job at Starbucks to pay their bills. Standing out from the sea of techs is much harder these days than these channels make it seem. Giving up Netflix for 2 years to spend 6 productive hours on coding/day is just simply not enough. Upwork will only work if you can standout from the sea of freelancers. We need more channels like yours that tell it how it is.
My company heavily relies on prior GitHub projects to make hiring decisions for developers. We tend to prefer those who are new with less experience and want to prove themselves, but have been incorrectly overlooked by other companies.
I've been hesitant to join upwork or similar sites, even though I've been hurting for work. I'm glad I stumbled on your videos. I'm going to continue networking and remove the middle man websites from the equation.
I cannot be more agree on all what you just said. I have been on Upwork since its inception back in 2015 when someone bought Odesk and Elance, which were thousand times better than Upwork, and merged them into this monster that has been slowly turning into a small getto of a few people selected to defend their trenches at all cost. I really miss the era when I joined Elance back in 2008 and I got a chance of making a full time freelance income for almost 8 years straight thanks to their excellent management and fair fees but when Elance disappeared, Upwork started dismanteling everything that made Elance so great. Some of the most remarkable "achievements" of Upwork that I have seen during all these years are: - 2 Upwork's CEOs have resigned in less than 5 years - A couple of years ago Upwork's servers suffered a considerable amount of downtimes which led to thousands of users being deprived of ANY communication with their clients missing deadlines and delivery commitments. (I have an entire folder of dozens of screencaptures showing the errors, and the silly excuses from Upwork's tech support) Some of those downtimes spanned up to even more than 48 hours on some instances. - Upwork support forum created with the most loyal Upwork's fans (Elance had no need for that as user support was so great that was able to solve most of the issues with their own internal staff alone) I have seen lots of memorable disrespectful assistants treating user complaints like shit shifting the blame of their claims on them most of the times. - removal of Elance score that did not punished you if you spend long periods of time without getting jobs or simply working for a single client as it happens now. - removal of realtime assistance chat. - Increasing the fees from a max 15% for the higher budged bids to a wooping fixed 20% for ALL the projects. - decrease of specific value of free and paid connects, which had the same value disrgarding the budged of every project till now. Now some projects cost you even 6 connects to bid for. - I could go on and on and on but I'm not sure how much time I'll need to spend to explain all I have seen during these last years. Anyways thank you if anyone spent the time reading and thank you Josh to put all in perspective and give us the opportunity to share our experience with you here.
I love seeing people share stories here and reading about people's viewpoints. I use upwork everyday and have done a lot of business on there. While the fees suck I will be happy to pay since the leads can be high quality.
My whole career started from upwork.Thankfully I was on it before it was pay to win so I could apply to 30 jobs per month as a free user. It took me 4 months to get one gig after sending out around 120 CVs and while the percentage that they take is ridiculous, it was a good place for a starting freelancer to make contacts and try out the freelance life. That being said, I can't imagine using that platform ever again with how it is now or even as a professional as it has become so crappy towards newcomers and the cuts that they take are insane.
Huh. It's a good thing I didn't start working on upwork then. It's a good thing you tell these things because nobody actually taught me how to look for job/negotiate pay/freelance. Maybe it's their mechanism for reducing competition, but I'd rather have someone to help me and then help someone else in return.
You saved me a ton of stress before diving deep into upwork. My spider senses were tingling from upwork but this opened my eyes to upwork shady business tactics.
@@Tanya-yu6mf For some reason this reminds me of tipping culture in America. People trying to justify it by saying that "if you do good service, you get good tips". Nah, customers are going to be fucking assholes and your paycheck is going to suffer no matter how good you do. Same for Fiverr.
@Solve Everything Its online, and people making careers on the web is relatively new... so I'm assuming no. Especially given most law-makers don't seem to grasp the concept of the Internet to begin with, and since its the Internet I think its hard to determine who would have legal domain over it anyways.
I've been thinking about that recently but my problem with that is that eventually is going to end up full of shitty companies and shitty positions. I think is better to build a presence with a website and post your services on craigslist and newspapers.
@LazicStefan sustainability is a very important concept. It means that whatever you are doing can be sustained for long period of time. If you're farming and in 10 years land is good for nothing - not sustainable. If you change to practices that can keep soil quality for 100s of years - now it's sustainable. It does not mean that every business talking about sustainability is really sustainable - just like if business talks about AI doesn't mean they do AI - but nonetheless the concept it self while a buzzword is still very important and meaningful. Blockchain on other hand is just gibberish that helps to hide the fact that your IPO or whatever it is has no added value to offer. It's a a low level implementation detail of database systems. Normally you would not talk about technical implementation details of your database when you are describing a business or a social movement. But when your movement is about nothing then talking complicated gibberish helps to forget that you aren't solving real problems.
@LazicStefan spot on, buzzwords are thrown around without understanding its real meaning and intention. soon we'll have some genius spouting 'sustainable forest fires'
You can't really blame these websites.. they are taking away the most difficult part of owning a "freelancing" business, finding clients. Personally I don't use upwork or Fiverr, but I do tell all of my clients that I'll pay them 20% of a completed contract if they refer me to another entrepreneur or business who needs my services. Because they have an incentive to refer me. Of course they might refer me if I'm really good at what I do.. but I tell them that their recommendation has value to me. Because of that I'm never at a loss for work, I make six figures every year, and I gladly pay 20% commissions on referrals, because I don't have to spend ANY money advertising myself, or spend ANY time trying to find the next gig. Not to mention that I can usually increase my price 25% because the new customer is already sold on me due to the recommendation of the previous client. If you're just getting started, these websites bring the clients to you, you have a chance to win their business, and the website is entitled to earn some $ from that. Is that awesome? No. But no website is going to do that for free. Ever.
@thomas samson There are more contract jobs available via upwork/fiverr than any other job site in the world. You absolutely should be applying for every contract job elsewhere, but there's more here, and they charge for it. That's why.
@@embohansen1203 Which I believe is what Josh is saying, if you have to- get the work, and then see if you can convince your new found "client" to take the work off of upwork.
@thomas samson I did not. That happens in real life too. My point is this: you should be paying referral fees whether you're working offline or online, so there's not much of a difference when you're getting started. It's obviously not ideal, but to act like the website is screwing you and is at fault is not my opinion. Bad customers are bad customers, and websites that provide a service deserve to be compensated. I believe upwork/fiverr IS providing a service, and I believe there are bad customers everywhere.
@thomas samson I have a client in Arizona who owes me $5000 and has no intention to pay. It would cost me more than that to sue him and win. I much rather would have spent that 5000 on referral fees where I bet more people would have paid me than one guy offline. You can't just assume from comments that the entire website is robbing people and it's worthless. They are providing a valuable service by bringing clients to you. Clients will refuse to pay if they're crappy clients regardless of whether they are on a website like upwork or whether they found you from word of mouth or on indeed or anywhere else. What else you got?
People-per-hour actually gets this no-contact policy even further. You can't even write words such as "email", "chat", "money" or "payment" when messaging your client and they can't do it as well, it will automatically block the send button. I remember when I was still trying to work on such platforms, there was a client who needed a simple change of email address on his website and we couldn't understand each other for some time just because of this idiocy he couldn't explicitly say what he needed. And I believe aside from charging you 20%, they also charge your client 30% on top of it.
@@CaptmagiKono Well, my client simply got scared to do something like that (they give you a long message when you try send message with these words on how they will block you if they decide that you're trying to contact another side outside the platform in any way) and was trying to his best abilities to explain what he wanted without saying it.
@@EleroyGreen How do you show the website you've made to the client? for eg, if you've developed the website in the local environment and you are using a software like NGROK to generate a link that allows your client to see the website without you even uploading it on live server. Do people per hour allow this? I mean providing a generated link to your client to view the site? I hope you got what is said. Sorry for my bad English :D
@@maysumraza8198 Your English is not bad my friend :) While I was there it was totally allowed. Actually, another one of my clients send me full information on his account on some hosting (link, password, username), through which anyone could get his credit card info (he was having it there for auto-renewing subscriptions). So, back then at least, pph didn't mind you sending any information (even if it's really sensitive and can be used by any pph employee who happened to read your chat, probably with little consequences too :D) as long as you don't use forbidden words and don't try to contact the other side.
@@EleroyGreen I really appreciate your help :) Thank you. I was thinking to start freelancing and I decided to start on people per hour, as connects on upwork are paid now and Fiverr is a saturated marketplace where you lower your price so much that it is just a race to the bottom. People per hour is better I think for starting and gaining some experience.
I am so happy you are using your influence to help this group of people. The scummy scams go beyond the platform fees, the course creators coaching people to build their freelance empire by using those platforms are equally terrible.
By default, Upwork will automatically pay out whatever is on your account, to the account you specified, like Paypal or whatever, at certain times when you are over a certain threshold. $100 is the default.I work on Upwork now and it's a bitch finding the "Get Paid" thing, but they've never withheld my money. Google "Upwork Get Paid" and you should be able to get the money out.
Speaking as someone who fell away from Freelance in part because of these sites, thank you for this video. There are far too many shady companies who use their PR and fake online reviews and a slick website to cheat people - and it makes me genuinely hate capitalism at large.
@@koma7778 'Oh but China does it too!' So what? I'm fully aware China (a state sponsored capitalist country with aspects of communism, look it up) is also laced with the same problems. What does that change about the exploitative nature of these sites that are allowed to run unchecked? You took my dislike for the current system and then went 'Oh So YoU lIKe ChInA?' as if the world is just a choice between China's bullshit or the bullshit of unchecked rampant exploitative capitalism. And I have false thinking?
This information needs to be spread much further than your channel. Thank you for posting this! Many new programmers can get screwed because of this. I hope you can get this information to magazines or something.
Thanks man, I am learning to code and it's good to know real stuff about these so called freelancing websites before I even think of working as a web developer.
Superb video ! Thank you Joshua for 'dishing the dirt' on scumbag websites that use and abuse exceptionally talented people trying their level best to make their way in the world.
Upwork made me feel like that one time I bought myself a suit, the gentleman invited me in for coffee to discuss my wishes and I spent almost 1400 dollars on a custom suit. Later on I checked the receipt and saw he billed me 5,80 for the coffee I drank when he invited me in.
Starting on Upwork is really hard. On beginning those are bad and cheap projects just to get some reputation. Then you can start to get in to the better projects ... but 10% cut is insane. If anyone is bad with math, that $400 from $4’000 invoice. I moved to the direct contracts as soon as get more seasoned in development and freelancing and I’m suggesting everyone to follow Joshua tips on this as well.
Upwork gets a bad reputation this way (all the people worth their salt leave as soon as they can, and only the worst ones stay). Why can't they see it? They could lift restrictions and lower rates as participants get more experience and use that as an incentive to stay on the platform.
I made a decent chunk of change on Upwork, but it was almost always a bad experience. I can't really recommend it anymore, and the last time I touched it was March of this year. Never again.
Just curious, what was bad about the experiences? Was it the clients that were especially annoying, or was it the website that was making it more difficult than it needed to be?
The reason why they charge for you to apply is to control applicant quality and flow. If applicants have to pay, then only qualified, serious candidates will apply. This is the #1 issue with job boards - esp indeed - and we have our own way of managing this. But it’s a major challenge for employers - too many applicants not even close to qualified.
Damn, they microtransactioned the hell out of middle-man work. Do the companies even pay proportionate fees to the freelance website too or do they just make money off of freelancers?
HAHA, speaking about tips, happens in real life too. When I worked for a coffee shop, all tips that I got (or any other person) have been collected for a team-christmas dinner which I never attended in my life.....
2:47 _Most if not all the jobs posted on _*_The Ladders_*_ and _*_FlexJobs_*_ can be found and applied to for free on other websites._ - Makes total sense, don't it? Think about it: If you're an employer, it'd be counterproductive not to post the job on as many platforms as you can - free *or* paid.
The man's advice is rock solid really. I'm a dev that started it all with nothing then here 5 years later I made $30 on Upwork in those 5 years on Upwork however all my real experience is from indeed applying for contract gigs at agency's. Make yourself an LLC and most companies will even pay you substantially more
The fact that not only you highlight the problems and scams within these services but also provide a solution is just awesome and I don't think we can thank you enough! keep up with the good work brother.
I am freelancing on Freelancer.com. Yes they can read through your chats and download files. You are not allowed to ask for personal info or your messages get deleted pretty much insta. A lot of competition on freelancer.com as well. Tons of indians and scammers. Got contacted by scammers probably 7 times by now. 1-2 on average per week. I do hate bidding system because it is a race to the bottom who will slave away for lowest pay.
@@embohansen1203 Too many of them. Driving prices down. Spam bidding and flooding clients so your bids are buried in tons of spam which makes it hard to be noticed by clients.
@@raygo44 That's just how capitalism and globalism works. Internet is global. $3 an hour is decent pay for an Indian starting out his career in India. Everyone's trying to make a living.
@@anandjainishere I know that, but because of that it ruins or hinders earning potential for everyone else in EU and US, because the rest of the world can't survive on 3$. Also more often than not these indians can't deliver any high quality work or any work to begin with. Clients get half baked work and distrust any freelancer which screws over every single new developer in long run to gain experience, connections, clients and earn a living. Also let's not forget the amount of indian scammers I and probably most people run into.
I did one job on Upwork and it was low paying one for scoring reputation. I don't need this "Upwork" reputation any more, don't plan to use that service.
Upwork is good for people that want some extra money and as a student I absolutely love Upwork. Josh, imagine seeing an easy job 5 minutes in and there is 50+ proposals! Now when connects are not free, it's usually 5-10 and I got to land a few more jobs. It sucks for new people. And another thing, when you make more than $1000 with one client you pay 5% fee, it's not like for each job as you said. Honestly, didn't have issues with Upwork and I'm here over a year, always 5 star jobs and top rated status.
@youtubesucks Well, I never said you should make a career out of it. My point is that you CAN make a decent money working part time there if you're a student like me. I see no issue paying 5% fee and never had any problems with the site if that's your point
@youtubesucks As someone who has 300K in projects on upwork, I don't consider their fees insane. You aren't a slave to upwork although you are at the mercy of their policies and enforcement. I talk to clients all the time off their network that isn't an issue. For the most part Upwork leave's you alone. The issue is when you take payments off their network. They have an issue with that.
Upwork for me is, and always was, a means to an end. I use it to find people who are interested in the type of work I do and build a reputation on upwork so I can get MORE clients. But after a month or so I ALWAYS get them off upwork.
Appreciate your work, Josh. More freelancers need to stand up for fairness and respect. The work that you do is so very important because you give people confidence raising their voice on issues that most of us know but often remain tolerated in fear of losing a job. Maybe we should start a union?
Worse thing is clients ask your phone number so that they can chat and communicate freely. But because of these sites...we have to insist on it and may even lose the contract.
As an employer / client, I really liked Upwork at first. but when they wanted to charge me a monthly fee to allow more invites, I liked them less. I do feel it is unfair for freelancers to have to pay to apply for a job. I do really like Upwork for small, simple jobs or projects. I have always found a fl to do a task on UPwork.
*Only Work for Free if it's to build reputation* CGP Grey once talked about this, when it was topical a few years back. He described a strategy of making a work list and letting people know that work will be slow because working for free means you're only doing it in your spare time. If people like your stuff then the list will grow larger over time and at a certain point, you start offering a fee to jump to the head of the line. The discussion focused around creative type works, but I suspect that it could be adapted to other more technical types of freelancing.
I'd actually defend upwork regarding connects. I'm not sure, that that's the best way to deal with a bunch of indian applications claiming they're able to do everything for everyone. So you end up applying couple of times for jobs, that you really feel confident doing, and get a much better result ratio. 20-50 cents is a small price to pay. There is a downside to it- it's much harder to expand to other technologies and do new stuff. On upwork I apply to 5-10-15 jobs max a month to get a month of work. On freelancer com I felt that I had to
@@Homiloko2 It was not really about lowering rates, more about finding a nice niche. In that niche I did one project for cheap for a friend, and then could use it as experience. Still not getting super greedy with my rates, but it's ok
You have some good points. I worked ~2000 hours on UpWork, now I'm thinking to try direct relationships with clients. UpWork takes a big piece of my salary, I just never though that there are other ways to find clients. Thanks.
Thanks, Joshua Exposing Shady Freelance Commerce Sites. I hate corporate scum bags and there are millions as I am finding out. I wish you the best to continue on your journey.
you know I wouldn't use these places to find work, but after your video I don't think I would use them to post work either. As it's jut one more step to lose information. As your hiring a person and giving them the information to do a job and then who knows who else is going to look at it through the platform. So if something is lost or stolen you know what that platform will do and just pass blame on the person you hired and then cut that person lose.
_"you're"_ , not _"your"_ . See e.g. www DOT wikihow DOT com/Use-You%27re-and-Your _"cut that person loose"_ , not _"cut that person lose"_ . See e.g. en DOT wiktionary DOT org/wiki/cut_someone_loose#Verb You can edit your comment.
Bro, I'm very sadness with this. I was planning to work on freelancing, because in my country I don't have enought resources to travel about 3hrs to work in a local company.
I was gonna post job on upwork but if this is what upwork does to freelancer then..F*** that! I'll find some freelancer myself within my network. Thank you Joshua Fluke.
Upwork is cool at making money. I am from Ukraine, a developing country, you know, with really low income and for people here upwork looks attractive. But not for me anymore. It can be good for a start, just for getting experience.
Well that guy from upwork Seki Veladzic, from his name I take it that he is from Europe, so he can request his full data that Upwork has on him, including the Report they have according to the GDPR rules and if they don't provide that information he can sue them.
Unbelievable, tips are gifted honourably and this form has arisen for a shared benefit between those of gratitude and acceptance. Management, business owners and the Government vultures behind every taxman are not due and poisoning the well for so many reasons I’ll write just swiftly, to not spiral into my own literary abyss or gaslit grandiosity. It’s slimy and a predatory own goal for the predictable and easily corrupted powers that be. Some jobs are not taxed and nobody in authority bothers them, think Pall Bearers for instance. Otherwise just legalise everything possible and stamp a tax code whilst watching the world burn... um., maybe still Overcooked the text ..
Upwork is not perfect but it changed my life. Rough start at first, but can be very lucrative once you find your niche. Been making 40k++ so far no problem.
Still "temporarily" banned on Fiverr, four years later. Says they sent me an email explaining it, but I've yet to receive it. They just up and banned me during a year of inactivity where I hadn't even logged on in forever. Probably the best thing that could happen, tbh.
0:28 : There isn't any best freelancer site. Apply for contract jobs instead. 0:38 : Upwork's turn. American (California). en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Upwork 1:31 : Perhaps in an effort to cut down on the equivalent of spam (and scams)? By putting up a small monetary barrier. 3:55 : Yeah, that is not very exclusive... 4:45 : Two years non-compete on Upwork (equivalent). USD 3,500 opt-out fee. 9:24 : Freelancer DOT com's turn. Australian. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Freelancer DOT com 12:02 : Fiverr's turn. Israeli. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Fiverr 13:00 : Fiverr takes your tips. 14:33 : The solution... Contract jobs AKA "freelancing" 14:51 : Indeed. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Indeed 15:12 : Stack Overflow Jobs. stackoverflow DOT com/jobs 15:52 : LinkedIn (!), Glassdoor. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/LinkedIn en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Glassdoor 16:17 : Make offers on Reddit to build brand and reputation. Josh worked for free! And is now credited in description for some RUclips videos. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Reddit
Well I had a full time job and I quit, I started freelancing doing something relatively new to me, I had 0 reputation + my account is registered in Serbia (which does not help), In the past year I have made about 10k on Upwork and 20k on Fiverr, and I love the new system where you pay for connects, because it is much easier to get a job now, as there are much less of those guys who have 2 or 3 accounts and just apply to every job with free connects, these guys usually also lie about who they are and what experience they have, so they "steal" the job from someone actually qualified, 20% seems like a lot, but then again go build a website from 0% promote it pay for marketing etc, a d tell me if you 1. made a y money whatsoever and 2. was it cheaper than 20%? (include the time you spent on it)... All you seem to be looking for is a quick buck, if you think longterm, UW is kind of great, and wuite fair as the fees go down and you have free escrow protection. So if you are good at what you do, it might take a month or two but you will get more and more jobs, you have to grind a bit in the beginning, but then again you have to do so everywhere. The real issue is usually in the mindset of milenials (I am one too, and ashamed of what milenials stand for these days) where you want no responsibility, no costs, no risks or fees, no pain, but all the profits and gains, that is not how the world works...
Yeah nice generalizing those few guys who try to bag projects, you are just afraid of the market not getting saturated its just that you don't want others to enter into your club, the one thing we can mutually agree on is keeping rate bare minimum according to global standards.
I totally get what you're saying about Upwork, and agree, it's gotten worse over time. But, my wife and I have been using it for years, and what we've come to realize is that it's a way to meet clients, and then move away from it. It's almost expected, with all of the clients we've worked with. Work with them a short time, during that time emails, phone numbers, skype accounts etc will be exchanged, which Upwork will give you a 'friendly' reminder to be careful about (literally highlights the keyword and gives you a popup), and once you trust each other, bippity boppity boop you're off Upwork working together. Most are happy to leave, and don't realize how much freelancers are charged and are happy to leave the platform to do you a favor. That's after you've built relative trust, of course. I've found some really great clients on Upwork, but I'll never work long-term on there. If a client refuses to leave the platform, I make a polite exit from the contract, two weeks notice kind of thing if necessary, and everyone's happy. It's definitely NOT my favorite way to work, but it's a one way to find clients. Just use good sense, and be smart. It's gotten really ridiculous as of late, though, regarding the fees.
The start is hard but if you succeed building a specific reputation you’ll face no competition on Freelancer. I work about 3 hours a day and make about 1000$ a week. They do get 10% but I like the freedom and flexibility.
Joshua Fluke there’s something you didn’t mention, you can become a “Preferred Freelancer” and they’ll take 15% instead of 10%, however you’ll literally get hammered with big jobs by Recruiters and you’ll never have to bid on anything or compete with anyone ever again. The way I see it is, I login, talk to a Recruiter, secure a big job for a week and work whenever I want and make money. It allows me to do my own thing and it’s better than a part-time job.
Joshua Fluke it’s definitely not a “career”, and isn’t even something that stays with u, I just see it as a good temporary way to make some cash while I do my own thing, that’s all.
I have been seriously considering closing down my Upwork account because, even though I was able to get a few decently paying writing jobs, too many people that sent me invitations to apply for their gigs wanted me to do a lot of research and work for a very small amount of pay. I sometimes told them frankly that I could make more money flipping burgers. I am looking for ways to find work on my own with no “middlemen”.
Again, you're doing a lot of speaking from naivety here, just as in the last video. Upwork provides more services than just "the ability to apply for jobs". For example: 1. Most notably, a service it provides is "certainty" (if you've ever had to chase payments, you know what I mean already). For example, when you log hours w/ the Upwork app, your hours are protected; The client is obligated to pay for those hours by default. In order to weasel out of paying those hours, the client would have to prove conclusively (beyond the shadow of a doubt) that you were not working on their project for the amount of time claimed. Similarly, with milestone-based contracts, Upwork provides an escrow service so that you don't have to worry about whether your client can afford to pay you for the milestone that you're working for. 2. Another service it provides (for me, at least) is marketing. I don't know what this whole "connects hustle" is all about, because potential clients discover ME through Upwork, and send me invites to jobs they think I might be interested in. Paying for PPC, paying someone to market for me, or taking time to do it myself when I could be doing actual dev for $65-$105/hr. in the same amount of time instead is EXPENSIVE. When I get a new contract, I chalk the initial 20% fees up to $500 as paying a finder's fee. And it's a service I'm grateful for. I want to work on dev; I don't want to spend all of my time looking for clients. 3. Yet another service Upwork provides (at least me, since I do high-quality work) is a trustworthy, verifiable track record. I can make my own website and write a bunch of genuine testimonials, sure... But many future potential clients will still have that doubt in their head: "Well, he could just be making them up" or "He could be terrible to work with and just cherry-picked the good reviews". And this track record folds into Point #2, because it causes the marketing efforts to snowball. Upwork wants to recommend me to people because they win when high-quality freelancers keep billing on their platform, so they keep sending people my way. I can pick from the ones I want to work with, I usually get a good review, and then the snowball continues. And your concerns about "being on top of the world and then having it all crumble" (basically) are unfounded. One of the perks Upwork provides me as a Top-Rated Freelancer is the ability to remove feedback if I had a one-off bad experience with a bad client: support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/219801228-Feedback-Removal To me, you're really doubling down on wrongness here just to chase the views that appealing to popular (and poorly-justified) opinion brings. They say that "misery loves company", and the service you're starting to provide now is just a place for miserable people to come together and bring each other further down with their "doomer" outlooks on life. Seriously, look at the trends in the tone of your videos from a detached perspective. Look at trends of the attitudes of the people in your comments. Increasingly doom-and-gloom. So much of it that despite how ridiculous it is, the bandwagon fallacy might make you start believing the echo chamber of unjustified moping. If your name is Wes Bos and you're giving tech conferences regularly, then yes, you will probably have a steady stream of trustworthy and reliable high-profile clients, without the need for the support of a platform. But some random dev, just going along on his own with no marketing experience, little legal understanding, etc.? Most of us devs who just wanna work on dev are in that boat. And a platform helps support the dream of just doing dev without being so worried about all the supplementary crap. A no-name dev with no proven experience will suffer, platform or not. But a platform eases that suffering a bit. With platforms, it doesn't have to be a case of bad/worse or bad/good. Depending on your own individual circumstances, a platform may or may not make sense for you. But it's definitely not "objectively bad". For one person, a platform could be good, and working outside of a platform might be even better. I subbed because you were honest, straightforward, and relatable, but I'm unsubbing now because it feels you're becoming an insufferably-negative doomer just to chase doomers' viewership. Your new audience of depressed shut-ins loves your "LinkedIn Cringe" videos because they're bitterly unemployed, and you've obviously been doubling down on things like that because you're following what works on your dashboard to try to keep your views (and thereby, income) high. Chasing views is causing your viewerbase to shape you rather than the other way around, which ironically destroys the authenticity that I originally subbed to see.
Oh, also, on your "how do you get started thing" -- Yes, you do the second thing you said; Start out with an underpaid job and work your way up, just regular dev jobs. If you've already accomplished great things in a regular dev job and just want to move to freelancing now, you build your profile with an attention-grabbing "Big Fat Claim", spend another paragraph backing it up, and then put 1-2 sentences inviting the client in question to have a nice little friendly low-pressure fireside chat with you.
Oh, one more thing I had in mind while I was writing that wall of text but forgot by the time I was done: "Circumventing w/o circumventing" is pretty easy to do without getting in trouble, esp. since US laws allow you to contract with a company as if it were a living entity. Let me elaborate. For example, one of my Upwork contracts is creating internal tools for a specific DoorDash department. Do you suppose that I wouldn't be able to accept a job offer w/ DoorDash just because I worked with someone on an individual basis to create a department-specific internal tool? Of course not! If you really want to get out of your 2-year exclusivity agreement, just create your own distinct corporation, and have it contract with your "client's" distinct corporation. You and your client are now, for all intents and purposes, "different people" than who the freelancer and client were on Upwork. As far as I can tell in scrutinizing the user agreement, nothing there prohibits "Josh" and "Steve" from communicating with each other outside Upwork as employees of the thin shell companies "JoshLLC" and "SteveLLC".
I've been using upwork for many years now and have over 300K in projects and I agree with the both of you. I do also think this video while technically correct about policies is still misleading. I still love Josh's videos and this isn't a reason to unsub even if I don't completely agree.
![Coheed and Cambria - Searching for Tomorrow [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hDsYGLbmadg/mqdefault.jpg)
There is no 'best' freelance site, nor is there a need to build a 'better' freelance website. Just use REGULAR job sites like indeed, stackoverflow, monsterjobs, glassdoor, dribble jobs, linkedin jobs, weworkremotely, remoteok.io and search specifically for part time, temporary, and contract. No fees to apply, no fees taken from your pay, no clauses preventing you from getting contact information.
@Joshua Fluke Love your content and value you provide to people and can understand your viewpoint on Upwork. Don't let other peoples views ever stop you from posting your videos or viewpoints,. I love reading all the threads on here of people's experiences and seeing what other people are doing to get jobs. I will say that I felt the same way initially about upwork policies, but I have grown to understand the verbiage and nuances of their policies and what upwork does to enforce it. As someone who has over 300K in projects on upwork I've run into virtually every conceivable situation with clients and projects and pushed the bounds of Upwork's policies. I will say that in the beginning when I didn't know completely of all their policies or their enforcement of their policies, that I asked a client to pay via paypal for $500 on their chat (which they monitor for red flags). Client made that payment. However Upwork pretty quickly detected that message and did a temporary suspension of some sort (not a full suspension) of my account and clients account and gave us both a warning not to do that again and forced us to respond that we understood and not do it again. I didn't like how that played out, but kept working on their platform, because the leads and projects kept coming in. You are allowed to talk to clients off their network however Upwork does strongly recommend that you keep conversations on their network. I have all my client's emails and contact info and vice-versa. It's just a big no no to get caught receiving payments off their platform. I typically will start out having all conversations on upwork's platform, but slowly switch it over to emails or skype. In my job proposal bids I put in my phone number and skype and haven't had any issues. Also if a client even mentions making payment via some other source via Upwork's messaging system I always tell the client to not do that as it's against Upwork's policies and that they are monitoring the chat. Client then responds back that they understand. There were times where a client had a laugh about it by saying in the chat "Upwork if you are listening we will be paying only through your platform." Anyways It can be good if we have an unbiased 3rd party monitoring business chats in case of abuse or dispute later on that I can reference. So its not all policing of policy.
I've had a situation on a project where client didn't want to release final payment after a project was complete. Their money was in Upwork's escrow. Thankfully I had all conversations on their network to reference in case of a dispute (I haven't gone through the dispute process but was very close on this instance). Upwork helped through that process of mediating and client eventually agreed to release payment before going to arbitration. I knew he was bluffing (BTW there is a $300 for each party and for Upwork to go to a third party arbitration service and client's usually do not want to pay for that to recover money in escrow).
I had also another issue where a client was trying to scam me to do work and kept asking me to do more work quickly. I put my hours through upwork for one week and that looked like it went through. There was some issue with client's account and he got suspended. It looked like client was logging in from different countries and creating multiple accounts. Anyways it was a $1000 worth of work for the first week that looked like it went through, but client did a charge back on it. Long story short, Upwork still paid me the $1,000 and took the loss for it. So there's a positive there.
Anyways I could go on and on about Upwork stories. There is good and bad. I do have empathy for new users on Upwork as they have to build up to get going which I understand is a huge issue for you. Anyways for the most part now Upwork leaves me alone. I guess I have made them a ton of money and I also have made a ton of money so it's win/win. I don't charge $60-$100/hr like other people claim on here. I suppose I can go higher on my rate, but when getting new clients I will keep it competitive.
Overall in my opinion I think Upwork has setup their policies to help both sides. They also do it to help with their marketing to get clients to post their jobs and use their platform. They advertise that client's can keep track of freelancers etc. etc., and pay for only approved work etc, etc. but in reality thats only partially true. I don't use their time tracker application which takes screenshots as I am against that and the way that client pays only for approved work is by disputing hours or budgets after the work is done ( there is a week period after I submit my hours for client to dispute it after that they cannot dispute it). This marketing however is somewhat true and is an incentive to get clients to use their platform and a way for clients to feel confident to post a job. Since there are a lot of bad/inexperienced freelancers out there so more business comes to me as a result so I try to get to clients before some other freelancer gets to them. Anyways I think its important with some clients that money is stored in an escrow just to build on some trust as there is a lot of scammers out there on both sides. Their platform is not perfect, but it works for me and for others as well as for clients. I also think there is less of a chance for a client to get out of line (although they still do) since there is a perception that the freelancer is protected to some degree by the platform (I would say there is a little bit of protection, which I will bring up in case there is issues with the client).
One last thing I have to say about looking for jobs on indeed is that there really isn't any reputation that the client can look up while there is on Upwork. That can lead to interviews where you have to jump through hoops and tests to get the contract or job. Not to say that doesn't happen on upwork, but I can just win over the client by selling myself and showing reputation on upwork and not having to go through all these tests. I'm not looking to get hired full time. Just want to work on the project and get it done and support it if clients want support.
What are your thoughts on toptal?
Thanks, the costs of connects is a big deal once it piles up, remember not all countries have pounds, euros or dollars as a currency, some countries need to shelve 50 local-currency to convert for 1 dollar, and some countries have 55 local-currency minimum wage for a full time job. Agencies or contractless jobs pay even lower.
People often overlook how "cheap" 1 dollar can be, but often overlook they're the top 3 with the biggest exchange rates. Yeah it's 1 dollar but it's 1 wage hour in my country. We're not exactly poor but that's no reason not to be frugal right?
Up work is all about who can bid the lowest rate for their work. Freelance is all about who pays the most money to work
If that person that was banned from up work was from Europe, up work is legally required to expose the data they have on the user. Including any "reports" that they supposibly have to keep "private" from the user
Love the thumbnail, makes you think that he is apologizing for bashing upwork, and then he just obliterates it further
Programming Addict Addict kinda felt it was bait-n-switch.
wanted an excuse to hate upwork. while i agree with josh on just about everything, this is not one. (don’t don’t read that in josh’s middle management voice)
Yeah, I came here thinking "What the hell...".
Honestly if you've been subbed to Josh for longer than a few months you know what's up. Lol.
@@writegoodcode815 Yeah I see your point. He does deliver this info about the websites like it's the worst thing in the world, but he still puts out valuable information - that all these websites try to lock you down so they can take the piece of the pie, and if they're your only source of income they hold your well being since they can just ban you for no reason. For Josh, it seems that this is unacceptable and that's I think why he delivered it the way he did, but it's good to be at least aware of what you're getting yourself into if you decide to go that route
good marketing!
Upwork is like a restaurant that charges to give you the Menu, then charges you for your order, and for the meal.
Plus you also cook the meal.
You wrote this same response in another post
I would say more like a university, you pay for the classes, for each test, and the semester. And in the end you don't really feel like you achieved anything.
And $3500 if you want to take the leftover home :D
EA is worried now.
I love when people say "it's a private company they can do what they want, if you don't like the TOS, don't agree to it and don't use their service". Here's the thing, many companies write in the TOS that they can change the terms at anytime without notifying you. They treat it like a contract but how many contracts do you know that allows one party to change the terms at anytime without notifying the other party? The answer, none, because that's not a contract. So they shouldn't be allowed to hold you financially liable for violating their little rules. It's complete and utter bullshit.
why is Uber so successful? they operate with similar practise, yet without drivers it wouldnt be possible...
@@effexon Uber is successful, but they are horrible for the drivers.
Of course UW has to (and does) inform clients of changes, and they usually will give you a period of time where you can explicitly not agree to the changes in which case usually you will leave the contract (close your account in this case), I do not know where you got that information. From many comments here I see that people are mad at Upwork for not making them tons of money or not fast enough, or for other reasons that they themselves are responsible for. It is all that "the teacher does not like me" mentality...
@@effexon Not even remotely similar, uber has people doing a very particular thing, while upwork is just a marketplace where supply and demand meet in many different forms. Personally, I paid over 1500 USD to Upwork in fees last year and I do not regret one cent of that, I do not have to care about marketing or a website or portfolio, it all happens naturally.
Most of the time these TOS are just bullshit scare tactics, nothing more.
Hey man, I feel like you're one of the few RUclipsrs that has been honest and open to their channel since day one. I am a new kid in front-end programming whose leaving the military for a new adventure and starting over. You're one of the few I can relate. Keep making awesome contents.
Roger that. Appreciate you
If you make Upwork as your main source of income, you will have a hard time. But if you make it secondary and still have a full-time job, it will do wonders.
Last job I applied costed me 21 connects. It is now waaay more expensive. And the clients won’t even look the proposals, keep them there until they expire and the connects won’t be refounded. I bought 100 connects these days, I’m top rated freelancer, now I’m almost running out of connects and I haven’t had one single aplicantion reviewd by a client.
Wow, I was thinking about trying out upwork - it seems I'm better off delivering pizza. 😂
These freelancer services are like casinos. The house always wins.
Not true I've tried online poker and freelancer. I got good money from one side and on the other people were trying to use me like garbage giving me extra duties or leave bad rating and couldn't got a lot chances.
So casinos are nicer.
@@Sanya192 lmao nice one
There're not Non profits brother!
If a company ever bans you without reason. Demand full information from your account as per GDPR. They don't reply within 30 days, report them. They will be fined.
Usually doesn't work if you live outside the EU though.
Report where?
@@soonfamous GDPR EU laws
@@TatharNuar Pretty sure that GDPR holds as long as a company is serving their service in an EU country. Correct me if I'm wrong, but even Google, which is an American company, has to comply to GDPR since they are serving users in the EU. Now, if you don't live in the EU you obviously can't use the GDPR since, well, you're not European.
Might be mistaken, if I am please enlighten me, laws aren't written in a way such that normal people can understand them.
even if they do reply, how can we tell if they are providing complete and accurate information? What if they just cook something up to make themselves look good while hiding more important information in their servers?
I made a Fiverr account a few months ago. In those few months I got about 30 fake job requests from 1 day old accounts that were banned the next day. Then they turned off my account for not accepting any of the offers. Good times.
My experience with fiverr wasn't much better. How it can work for anyone, I don't know, but I guess the owners of fiverr are making $$. I don't wish to be a "donor".
did pretty well on it for a couple of months and i didn't charge a low cost for coding either. i think its just luck of the draw honestly.
how to freelnace as 16 year old
You don't job requests on Fiverr!
That is a legit tactic to keep the competition in a niche down. It has worked so well that they have even torpedoed level 2 seller accounts. It was removed from a sub reddit i was surfing but the basic premise was. Outsource the scheme to india or china....have them make throw away accounts on fiverr.... flood the new/level 1 sellers in your niche with fake job requests. Sit back and watch Fiverr take out your competition.
the politeness in these emails are so fake
Their politeness is more like passive aggressive anger.
its a policy
I couldn't agree more.
@@patientlyunaccountable6805 Also, if it´s a person, it can be someone copy-pasting a script. I saw it before.
@@patientlyunaccountable6805 A lot of freelancers are from there that's why most banned are from there. But they ban people from other countries as well and for ridiculous reason - if clients do not accept your proposals for a long time, you can be banned. But we all understand that clients refuse if you are charging more than others. Which means this policy leads to lower bids and this looks super-stupid to me. If company takes percentage, they should be interested in higher prices, not lower.
I recently had something shitty on Upworks. I’m a pop culture writer, and there was a listing asking for an article titled “5 amazing facts about rockstars.” I applied to the job, then the job poster messaged me and asked “what are the 5 facts?”
I then responded with 5 facts about rockstars, and then job poster never responded. This makes me think that they just used my facts and used them to write content for their own content . I also saw that they had completed 5 to 10 interviews for that same job, so it potentially means he got 5 facts from each of them. So that’s some fun bullshit to add to the list of shitty things about upworks. The job posters might just be using the platform to get content out of freelancers through interview questions and/or writing tests.
Perhaps a reason to feed them content that is (subtly) incorrect and/or internally logically inconsistent (they probably don't understand it if they are just collectors)? That can be fixed later during editing/touch-up.
thomas samson - I thought that was the “interview” portion of our interaction. But that’s not the point, the point is that I’m a freelancer desperate to grow my portfolio and many people on Upwork want to take advantage.
SquishyCandyftw - I agree that working for free is never ideal. But I live in NYC and it’s nearly impossible to get any entry level experience without taking non-paying internships. It’s wrong and shouldn’t be the norm, but that’s just how it is out here.
This is something that happens on all freelancing websites, not just Upwork.
@@zhangjao6328 Oh... okay.... thanks then?
This channel is so underrated! These days too many tech channels capitalize on “baseless optimism” like many universities and the fact that you keep it real makes this channel instantly stand out. Upwork, Fiverr, or office Jobs all have one thing in common. No one wants to be the first everyone wants prior experience. Find someone extremely knowledgeable in their field and pay them shit. You can end up a broke freelancer much like an unemployed DBA or Sec Analyst or Dev. The fact that people still buy that there is a “shortage” of skilled pros is simply unbelievable. I feel bad for all these kids with bachelors, CompTIA/Cisco certs, countless hours spent on Udemy, home labs, github projects etc. who will have to pick up a job at Starbucks to pay their bills. Standing out from the sea of techs is much harder these days than these channels make it seem. Giving up Netflix for 2 years to spend 6 productive hours on coding/day is just simply not enough. Upwork will only work if you can standout from the sea of freelancers. We need more channels like yours that tell it how it is.
My company heavily relies on prior GitHub projects to make hiring decisions for developers. We tend to prefer those who are new with less experience and want to prove themselves, but have been incorrectly overlooked by other companies.
I've been hesitant to join upwork or similar sites, even though I've been hurting for work. I'm glad I stumbled on your videos. I'm going to continue networking and remove the middle man websites from the equation.
Same here, I am going to delete my Upwork account. Faced some of the problems mentioned in the video clip. Each and every word of Joshua is correct.
Indeed is a better option. Free lol
I cannot be more agree on all what you just said. I have been on Upwork since its inception back in 2015 when someone bought Odesk and Elance, which were thousand times better than Upwork, and merged them into this monster that has been slowly turning into a small getto of a few people selected to defend their trenches at all cost.
I really miss the era when I joined Elance back in 2008 and I got a chance of making a full time freelance income for almost 8 years straight thanks to their excellent management and fair fees but when Elance disappeared, Upwork started dismanteling everything that made Elance so great.
Some of the most remarkable "achievements" of Upwork that I have seen during all these years are:
- 2 Upwork's CEOs have resigned in less than 5 years
- A couple of years ago Upwork's servers suffered a considerable amount of downtimes which led to thousands of users being deprived of ANY communication with their clients missing deadlines and delivery commitments. (I have an entire folder of dozens of screencaptures showing the errors, and the silly excuses from Upwork's tech support) Some of those downtimes spanned up to even more than 48 hours on some instances.
- Upwork support forum created with the most loyal Upwork's fans (Elance had no need for that as user support was so great that was able to solve most of the issues with their own internal staff alone) I have seen lots of memorable disrespectful assistants treating user complaints like shit shifting the blame of their claims on them most of the times.
- removal of Elance score that did not punished you if you spend long periods of time without getting jobs or simply working for a single client as it happens now.
- removal of realtime assistance chat.
- Increasing the fees from a max 15% for the higher budged bids to a wooping fixed 20% for ALL the projects.
- decrease of specific value of free and paid connects, which had the same value disrgarding the budged of every project till now. Now some projects cost you even 6 connects to bid for.
- I could go on and on and on but I'm not sure how much time I'll need to spend to explain all I have seen during these last years. Anyways thank you if anyone spent the time reading and thank you Josh to put all in perspective and give us the opportunity to share our experience with you here.
I love seeing people share stories here and reading about people's viewpoints. I use upwork everyday and have done a lot of business on there. While the fees suck I will be happy to pay since the leads can be high quality.
My whole career started from upwork.Thankfully I was on it before it was pay to win so I could apply to 30 jobs per month as a free user. It took me 4 months to get one gig after sending out around 120 CVs and while the percentage that they take is ridiculous, it was a good place for a starting freelancer to make contacts and try out the freelance life. That being said, I can't imagine using that platform ever again with how it is now or even as a professional as it has become so crappy towards newcomers and the cuts that they take are insane.
I love how the dog is just chillin in the back... nothing like a dog to show you love!
Huh. It's a good thing I didn't start working on upwork then. It's a good thing you tell these things because nobody actually taught me how to look for job/negotiate pay/freelance. Maybe it's their mechanism for reducing competition, but I'd rather have someone to help me and then help someone else in return.
You saved me a ton of stress before diving deep into upwork. My spider senses were tingling from upwork but this opened my eyes to upwork shady business tactics.
I got banned on Fiverr for having bad customers
Imagine being banned because assholes chose to work with you
@@Tanya-yu6mf exactly what he has written
@@Tanya-yu6mf For some reason this reminds me of tipping culture in America.
People trying to justify it by saying that "if you do good service, you get good tips".
Nah, customers are going to be fucking assholes and your paycheck is going to suffer no matter how good you do.
Same for Fiverr.
@Solve Everything Its online, and people making careers on the web is relatively new... so I'm assuming no. Especially given most law-makers don't seem to grasp the concept of the Internet to begin with, and since its the Internet I think its hard to determine who would have legal domain over it anyways.
Same here... the more Fiverr grew, the worse it got
we seriously need to develop a blockchain powered freelancing site.
Isn't that just trading bitcoin for stuff?
Why a blockchain based one for interest? Genuinely interested as idly thinking about building a freelancer style site.
I've been thinking about that recently but my problem with that is that eventually is going to end up full of shitty companies and shitty positions. I think is better to build a presence with a website and post your services on craigslist and newspapers.
@LazicStefan sustainability is a very important concept. It means that whatever you are doing can be sustained for long period of time. If you're farming and in 10 years land is good for nothing - not sustainable. If you change to practices that can keep soil quality for 100s of years - now it's sustainable. It does not mean that every business talking about sustainability is really sustainable - just like if business talks about AI doesn't mean they do AI - but nonetheless the concept it self while a buzzword is still very important and meaningful.
Blockchain on other hand is just gibberish that helps to hide the fact that your IPO or whatever it is has no added value to offer. It's a a low level implementation detail of database systems. Normally you would not talk about technical implementation details of your database when you are describing a business or a social movement. But when your movement is about nothing then talking complicated gibberish helps to forget that you aren't solving real problems.
@LazicStefan spot on, buzzwords are thrown around without understanding its real meaning and intention. soon we'll have some genius spouting 'sustainable forest fires'
You can't really blame these websites.. they are taking away the most difficult part of owning a "freelancing" business, finding clients. Personally I don't use upwork or Fiverr, but I do tell all of my clients that I'll pay them 20% of a completed contract if they refer me to another entrepreneur or business who needs my services. Because they have an incentive to refer me. Of course they might refer me if I'm really good at what I do.. but I tell them that their recommendation has value to me. Because of that I'm never at a loss for work, I make six figures every year, and I gladly pay 20% commissions on referrals, because I don't have to spend ANY money advertising myself, or spend ANY time trying to find the next gig. Not to mention that I can usually increase my price 25% because the new customer is already sold on me due to the recommendation of the previous client. If you're just getting started, these websites bring the clients to you, you have a chance to win their business, and the website is entitled to earn some $ from that. Is that awesome? No. But no website is going to do that for free. Ever.
@thomas samson There are more contract jobs available via upwork/fiverr than any other job site in the world. You absolutely should be applying for every contract job elsewhere, but there's more here, and they charge for it. That's why.
That sounds like a reasonable view and a way to approach it: using "freelancing" sites is a kind of marketing.
@@embohansen1203 Which I believe is what Josh is saying, if you have to- get the work, and then see if you can convince your new found "client" to take the work off of upwork.
@thomas samson I did not. That happens in real life too. My point is this: you should be paying referral fees whether you're working offline or online, so there's not much of a difference when you're getting started. It's obviously not ideal, but to act like the website is screwing you and is at fault is not my opinion. Bad customers are bad customers, and websites that provide a service deserve to be compensated. I believe upwork/fiverr IS providing a service, and I believe there are bad customers everywhere.
@thomas samson I have a client in Arizona who owes me $5000 and has no intention to pay. It would cost me more than that to sue him and win. I much rather would have spent that 5000 on referral fees where I bet more people would have paid me than one guy offline. You can't just assume from comments that the entire website is robbing people and it's worthless. They are providing a valuable service by bringing clients to you. Clients will refuse to pay if they're crappy clients regardless of whether they are on a website like upwork or whether they found you from word of mouth or on indeed or anywhere else. What else you got?
People-per-hour actually gets this no-contact policy even further. You can't even write words such as "email", "chat", "money" or "payment" when messaging your client and they can't do it as well, it will automatically block the send button. I remember when I was still trying to work on such platforms, there was a client who needed a simple change of email address on his website and we couldn't understand each other for some time just because of this idiocy he couldn't explicitly say what he needed. And I believe aside from charging you 20%, they also charge your client 30% on top of it.
Would love to see the crazy ways that people would try and get around this. Probably simple shit like code-words and putting characters between words.
@@CaptmagiKono Well, my client simply got scared to do something like that (they give you a long message when you try send message with these words on how they will block you if they decide that you're trying to contact another side outside the platform in any way) and was trying to his best abilities to explain what he wanted without saying it.
@@EleroyGreen How do you show the website you've made to the client? for eg, if you've developed the website in the local environment and you are using a software like NGROK to generate a link that allows your client to see the website without you even uploading it on live server. Do people per hour allow this? I mean providing a generated link to your client to view the site? I hope you got what is said. Sorry for my bad English :D
@@maysumraza8198 Your English is not bad my friend :) While I was there it was totally allowed. Actually, another one of my clients send me full information on his account on some hosting (link, password, username), through which anyone could get his credit card info (he was having it there for auto-renewing subscriptions). So, back then at least, pph didn't mind you sending any information (even if it's really sensitive and can be used by any pph employee who happened to read your chat, probably with little consequences too :D) as long as you don't use forbidden words and don't try to contact the other side.
@@EleroyGreen I really appreciate your help :) Thank you. I was thinking to start freelancing and I decided to start on people per hour, as connects on upwork are paid now and Fiverr is a saturated marketplace where you lower your price so much that it is just a race to the bottom. People per hour is better I think for starting and gaining some experience.
I am so happy you are using your influence to help this group of people. The scummy scams go beyond the platform fees, the course creators coaching people to build their freelance empire by using those platforms are equally terrible.
upwork more like downwork (I'll see myself out now)
Fantastic_Timez just in case you’re still here. Get out.
@@hass89 I can't find the door >:(
Outwork*
"i'll get me coat..."
I did 1 job on upwork a few years ago and since I didn't make over $100 for the job upwork kept my money and wouldn't allow me to cash it out.
Wow that's crazy. Reminds of RUclips's ADsense 10dlr limit
what is your speciality on upwork?
By default, Upwork will automatically pay out whatever is on your account, to the account you specified, like Paypal or whatever, at certain times when you are over a certain threshold. $100 is the default.I work on Upwork now and it's a bitch finding the "Get Paid" thing, but they've never withheld my money. Google "Upwork Get Paid" and you should be able to get the money out.
Speaking as someone who fell away from Freelance in part because of these sites, thank you for this video. There are far too many shady companies who use their PR and fake online reviews and a slick website to cheat people - and it makes me genuinely hate capitalism at large.
In communist china fraud is even more than capitalist countries. Something to think about. You need to correct your false thinking.
@@koma7778 'Oh but China does it too!' So what? I'm fully aware China (a state sponsored capitalist country with aspects of communism, look it up) is also laced with the same problems. What does that change about the exploitative nature of these sites that are allowed to run unchecked?
You took my dislike for the current system and then went 'Oh So YoU lIKe ChInA?' as if the world is just a choice between China's bullshit or the bullshit of unchecked rampant exploitative capitalism. And I have false thinking?
This information needs to be spread much further than your channel. Thank you for posting this! Many new programmers can get screwed because of this. I hope you can get this information to magazines or something.
Thanks man,
I am learning to code and it's good to know real stuff about these so called freelancing websites before I even think of working as a web developer.
Ryuga Ryuga Me too!
Superb video ! Thank you Joshua for 'dishing the dirt' on scumbag websites that use and abuse exceptionally talented people trying their level best to make their way in the world.
Upwork made me feel like that one time I bought myself a suit, the gentleman invited me in for coffee to discuss my wishes and I spent almost 1400 dollars on a custom suit. Later on I checked the receipt and saw he billed me 5,80 for the coffee I drank when he invited me in.
Starting on Upwork is really hard. On beginning those are bad and cheap projects just to get some reputation. Then you can start to get in to the better projects ... but 10% cut is insane. If anyone is bad with math, that $400 from $4’000 invoice.
I moved to the direct contracts as soon as get more seasoned in development and freelancing and I’m suggesting everyone to follow Joshua tips on this as well.
Upwork gets a bad reputation this way (all the people worth their salt leave as soon as they can, and only the worst ones stay). Why can't they see it? They could lift restrictions and lower rates as participants get more experience and use that as an incentive to stay on the platform.
I made a decent chunk of change on Upwork, but it was almost always a bad experience. I can't really recommend it anymore, and the last time I touched it was March of this year. Never again.
Just curious, what was bad about the experiences? Was it the clients that were especially annoying, or was it the website that was making it more difficult than it needed to be?
I have used upwork for a week, it was very demotivating!!!
The reason why they charge for you to apply is to control applicant quality and flow. If applicants have to pay, then only qualified, serious candidates will apply.
This is the #1 issue with job boards - esp indeed - and we have our own way of managing this. But it’s a major challenge for employers - too many applicants not even close to qualified.
This video should be thumbed up and shared everywhere.
This is some good info for those of us trying to break in to the business. Thanks Josh.
Man, I remember Gordon Ramsay going off on a restaurant owner in Kitchen Nightmares for taking their employees' tips.
Thanks for your honest experience using these companies and saving the rest of us from having to go through this 🙌
Damn, they microtransactioned the hell out of middle-man work. Do the companies even pay proportionate fees to the freelance website too or do they just make money off of freelancers?
Joshua ~ it’s good that you are teaching people how to navigate the new business models .. Much appreciated.
HAHA, speaking about tips, happens in real life too. When I worked for a coffee shop, all tips that I got (or any other person) have been collected for a team-christmas dinner which I never attended in my life.....
2:47 _Most if not all the jobs posted on _*_The Ladders_*_ and _*_FlexJobs_*_ can be found and applied to for free on other websites._
- Makes total sense, don't it? Think about it: If you're an employer, it'd be counterproductive not to post the job on as many platforms as you can - free *or* paid.
Thank you for making another video on Upwork! This one is even much better than the previous one
When I saw the title of this I laughed out loud, lol!
You "laughed out loud, laughed out loud!" ? :))
Bush Lee lol
your dog: "don't stop with the massage" 7:30
I am shocked about all these details..I thought they were 'decent'. Thanks for bringing this to light! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
This is the kind of vids I subbed for + the doggo. Awesome.
The man's advice is rock solid really. I'm a dev that started it all with nothing then here 5 years later I made $30 on Upwork in those 5 years on Upwork however all my real experience is from indeed applying for contract gigs at agency's. Make yourself an LLC and most companies will even pay you substantially more
Without a job how are you supposed to pay to get one??????
You're supposed to start off already with a nice pile in the bank, apparently!
Ever heard about savings? And they're not really charging any substantial amount, it's up to 90 cents per job
The fact that not only you highlight the problems and scams within these services but also provide a solution is just awesome and I don't think we can thank you enough!
keep up with the good work brother.
Thanks for posting the video! It's so degrading to be part of these "freelance" websites
Finding and maintain the work is a job in and of itself.
I am freelancing on Freelancer.com. Yes they can read through your chats and download files. You are not allowed to ask for personal info or your messages get deleted pretty much insta. A lot of competition on freelancer.com as well. Tons of indians and scammers. Got contacted by scammers probably 7 times by now. 1-2 on average per week. I do hate bidding system because it is a race to the bottom who will slave away for lowest pay.
What is the problem with Indians? Can you elaborate?
@@embohansen1203 Too many of them. Driving prices down. Spam bidding and flooding clients so your bids are buried in tons of spam which makes it hard to be noticed by clients.
@@raygo44 That's just how capitalism and globalism works. Internet is global. $3 an hour is decent pay for an Indian starting out his career in India. Everyone's trying to make a living.
@@embohansen1203 They say yes to everything without any ability to do the work requested.
@@anandjainishere I know that, but because of that it ruins or hinders earning potential for everyone else in EU and US, because the rest of the world can't survive on 3$. Also more often than not these indians can't deliver any high quality work or any work to begin with. Clients get half baked work and distrust any freelancer which screws over every single new developer in long run to gain experience, connections, clients and earn a living. Also let's not forget the amount of indian scammers I and probably most people run into.
Random but I love how into it the dog is... He's just staring into your soul at one point.
I did one job on Upwork and it was low paying one for scoring reputation. I don't need this "Upwork" reputation any more, don't plan to use that service.
....so I came here thinking he was going to apologize for what he said about Upwork, then Bam!!!, "...it was worse than I thought".😂😂😂😂
Upwork is good for people that want some extra money and as a student I absolutely love Upwork.
Josh, imagine seeing an easy job 5 minutes in and there is 50+ proposals! Now when connects are not free, it's usually 5-10 and I got to land a few more jobs. It sucks for new people.
And another thing, when you make more than $1000 with one client you pay 5% fee, it's not like for each job as you said.
Honestly, didn't have issues with Upwork and I'm here over a year, always 5 star jobs and top rated status.
@youtubesucks Well, I never said you should make a career out of it. My point is that you CAN make a decent money working part time there if you're a student like me.
I see no issue paying 5% fee and never had any problems with the site if that's your point
@youtubesucks How screwed? What do you know about my current situation?
@youtubesucks you call it getting screwed, I call it extra $150 a week with a 5% fee. I'll take that. Have a good day : )
@youtubesucks thank YER bruv!
@youtubesucks As someone who has 300K in projects on upwork, I don't consider their fees insane. You aren't a slave to upwork although you are at the mercy of their policies and enforcement. I talk to clients all the time off their network that isn't an issue. For the most part Upwork leave's you alone. The issue is when you take payments off their network. They have an issue with that.
these freelance sites sound like scams. the more they say they aren't a scam the more I think they are.
Keep up the great work brother!!
Upwork for me is, and always was, a means to an end. I use it to find people who are interested in the type of work I do and build a reputation on upwork so I can get MORE clients. But after a month or so I ALWAYS get them off upwork.
EXACTLY, it is not a place to be forever with the same client
You don’t need UW - or other freelancer sites - if you can market yourself. #1 challenge for jobseekers is they don’t know how to market themselves.
What I noticed about up work josh is that a lot of people who do well have a pretty big social media presence, which in turn lands them more jobs
Appreciate your work, Josh. More freelancers need to stand up for fairness and respect. The work that you do is so very important because you give people confidence raising their voice on issues that most of us know but often remain tolerated in fear of losing a job. Maybe we should start a union?
Worse thing is clients ask your phone number so that they can chat and communicate freely.
But because of these sites...we have to insist on it and may even lose the contract.
As an employer / client, I really liked Upwork at first. but when they wanted to charge me a monthly fee to allow more invites, I liked them less. I do feel it is unfair for freelancers to have to pay to apply for a job. I do really like Upwork for small, simple jobs or projects. I have always found a fl to do a task on UPwork.
Thanks for keeping me from wasting my time and money on these sites.
*Only Work for Free if it's to build reputation*
CGP Grey once talked about this, when it was topical a few years back. He described a strategy of making a work list and letting people know that work will be slow because working for free means you're only doing it in your spare time. If people like your stuff then the list will grow larger over time and at a certain point, you start offering a fee to jump to the head of the line. The discussion focused around creative type works, but I suspect that it could be adapted to other more technical types of freelancing.
I'd actually defend upwork regarding connects. I'm not sure, that that's the best way to deal with a bunch of indian applications claiming they're able to do everything for everyone. So you end up applying couple of times for jobs, that you really feel confident doing, and get a much better result ratio. 20-50 cents is a small price to pay.
There is a downside to it- it's much harder to expand to other technologies and do new stuff.
On upwork I apply to 5-10-15 jobs max a month to get a month of work. On freelancer com I felt that I had to
How hard was it to get jobs when starting out? Did you have to lower your rates a lot?
or maybe just limit applicants by country.
@@Homiloko2 It was not really about lowering rates, more about finding a nice niche. In that niche I did one project for cheap for a friend, and then could use it as experience. Still not getting super greedy with my rates, but it's ok
@@ps2chiper112 proxies exist
So there is UK and US only jobs, for only US & UK freelancers.
You have some good points. I worked ~2000 hours on UpWork, now I'm thinking to try direct relationships with clients. UpWork takes a big piece of my salary, I just never though that there are other ways to find clients. Thanks.
Mostly of these sites are full of scammers I no longer use those platforms
Thanks, Joshua Exposing Shady Freelance Commerce Sites. I hate corporate scum bags and there are millions as I am finding out. I wish you the best to continue on your journey.
Upwork = Free Market version of Government Taxes
Thanks a lot, Josh ! Appreciate your fearless expose of these 'helpful' sites that are worse than regular options..
you know I wouldn't use these places to find work, but after your video I don't think I would use them to post work either. As it's jut one more step to lose information. As your hiring a person and giving them the information to do a job and then who knows who else is going to look at it through the platform. So if something is lost or stolen you know what that platform will do and just pass blame on the person you hired and then cut that person lose.
_"you're"_ , not _"your"_ . See e.g. www DOT wikihow DOT com/Use-You%27re-and-Your
_"cut that person loose"_ , not _"cut that person lose"_ . See e.g. en DOT wiktionary DOT org/wiki/cut_someone_loose#Verb
You can edit your comment.
Bro, I'm very sadness with this. I was planning to work on freelancing, because in my country I don't have enought resources to travel about 3hrs to work in a local company.
Also platform is just a word for middle man...
Freelancer sounds like Craigslist.
I was gonna post job on upwork but if this is what upwork does to freelancer then..F*** that! I'll find some freelancer myself within my network. Thank you Joshua Fluke.
Upwork does take 20% of any "bonuses" the client wants to give you.
Upwork is cool at making money. I am from Ukraine, a developing country, you know, with really low income and for people here upwork looks attractive. But not for me anymore.
It can be good for a start, just for getting experience.
Well that guy from upwork Seki Veladzic, from his name I take it that he is from Europe, so he can request his full data that Upwork has on him, including the Report they have according to the GDPR rules and if they don't provide that information he can sue them.
Good point.
I love 5:34 the dog is behind you with the look on his/her face of that is jack up yo!
Haha, I’m a waitress in Sweden and we need to pay tax on tips as well.
Tips are also taxed in USA. So sad 😭
how do they know that you got a tip ?
You pay tax on tips here, so tax on top of what upwork takes.
Unbelievable, tips are gifted honourably and this form has arisen for a shared benefit between those of gratitude and acceptance. Management, business owners and the Government vultures behind every taxman are not due and poisoning the well for so many reasons I’ll write just swiftly, to not spiral into my own literary abyss or gaslit grandiosity. It’s slimy and a predatory own goal for the predictable and easily corrupted powers that be. Some jobs are not taxed and nobody in authority bothers them, think Pall Bearers for instance. Otherwise just legalise everything possible and stamp a tax code whilst watching the world burn... um., maybe still Overcooked the text ..
Also where I live, We just never report them :)
Upwork is not perfect but it changed my life. Rough start at first, but can be very lucrative once you find your niche. Been making 40k++ so far no problem.
Jiman Najmi what do you do for leaving?
@@cristinaquitto9958 Video editing.
Still "temporarily" banned on Fiverr, four years later. Says they sent me an email explaining it, but I've yet to receive it. They just up and banned me during a year of inactivity where I hadn't even logged on in forever.
Probably the best thing that could happen, tbh.
0:28 : There isn't any best freelancer site. Apply for contract jobs instead.
0:38 : Upwork's turn. American (California). en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Upwork
1:31 : Perhaps in an effort to cut down on the equivalent of spam (and
scams)? By putting up a small monetary barrier.
3:55 : Yeah, that is not very exclusive...
4:45 : Two years non-compete on Upwork (equivalent). USD 3,500 opt-out fee.
9:24 : Freelancer DOT com's turn. Australian.
en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Freelancer DOT com
12:02 : Fiverr's turn. Israeli. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Fiverr
13:00 : Fiverr takes your tips.
14:33 : The solution... Contract jobs AKA "freelancing"
14:51 : Indeed. en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Indeed
15:12 : Stack Overflow Jobs. stackoverflow DOT com/jobs
15:52 : LinkedIn (!), Glassdoor.
en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/LinkedIn
en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Glassdoor
16:17 : Make offers on Reddit to build brand and reputation. Josh
worked for free! And is now credited in description
for some RUclips videos.
en DOT wikipedia DOT org/wiki/Reddit
Well I had a full time job and I quit, I started freelancing doing something relatively new to me, I had 0 reputation + my account is registered in Serbia (which does not help), In the past year I have made about 10k on Upwork and 20k on Fiverr, and I love the new system where you pay for connects, because it is much easier to get a job now, as there are much less of those guys who have 2 or 3 accounts and just apply to every job with free connects, these guys usually also lie about who they are and what experience they have, so they "steal" the job from someone actually qualified, 20% seems like a lot, but then again go build a website from 0% promote it pay for marketing etc, a d tell me if you 1. made a y money whatsoever and 2. was it cheaper than 20%? (include the time you spent on it)... All you seem to be looking for is a quick buck, if you think longterm, UW is kind of great, and wuite fair as the fees go down and you have free escrow protection. So if you are good at what you do, it might take a month or two but you will get more and more jobs, you have to grind a bit in the beginning, but then again you have to do so everywhere. The real issue is usually in the mindset of milenials (I am one too, and ashamed of what milenials stand for these days) where you want no responsibility, no costs, no risks or fees, no pain, but all the profits and gains, that is not how the world works...
Yeah nice generalizing those few guys who try to bag projects, you are just afraid of the market not getting saturated its just that you don't want others to enter into your club, the one thing we can mutually agree on is keeping rate bare minimum according to global standards.
I totally get what you're saying about Upwork, and agree, it's gotten worse over time. But, my wife and I have been using it for years, and what we've come to realize is that it's a way to meet clients, and then move away from it. It's almost expected, with all of the clients we've worked with. Work with them a short time, during that time emails, phone numbers, skype accounts etc will be exchanged, which Upwork will give you a 'friendly' reminder to be careful about (literally highlights the keyword and gives you a popup), and once you trust each other, bippity boppity boop you're off Upwork working together.
Most are happy to leave, and don't realize how much freelancers are charged and are happy to leave the platform to do you a favor. That's after you've built relative trust, of course.
I've found some really great clients on Upwork, but I'll never work long-term on there. If a client refuses to leave the platform, I make a polite exit from the contract, two weeks notice kind of thing if necessary, and everyone's happy. It's definitely NOT my favorite way to work, but it's a one way to find clients. Just use good sense, and be smart. It's gotten really ridiculous as of late, though, regarding the fees.
YOu have to pay money to apply for a job???!!?? What?!
The start is hard but if you succeed building a specific reputation you’ll face no competition on Freelancer. I work about 3 hours a day and make about 1000$ a week. They do get 10% but I like the freedom and flexibility.
These types are jobs are rare.
Joshua Fluke there’s something you didn’t mention, you can become a “Preferred Freelancer” and they’ll take 15% instead of 10%, however you’ll literally get hammered with big jobs by Recruiters and you’ll never have to bid on anything or compete with anyone ever again. The way I see it is, I login, talk to a Recruiter, secure a big job for a week and work whenever I want and make money. It allows me to do my own thing and it’s better than a part-time job.
@@marioadabachy if it's as good as you say, and no other options appeal, go for it
Joshua Fluke it’s definitely not a “career”, and isn’t even something that stays with u, I just see it as a good temporary way to make some cash while I do my own thing, that’s all.
@@marioadabachy thats the way to do it
Imagine if this video will watch by the CEO of upwork. And tell his/her face that he/she sucks.
This video has been REALLY helpful! Thanks.
That’s the reason why I’m not on those sites.
I have been seriously considering closing down my Upwork account because, even though I was able to get a few decently paying writing jobs, too many people that sent me invitations to apply for their gigs wanted me to do a lot of research and work for a very small amount of pay. I sometimes told them frankly that I could make more money flipping burgers. I am looking for ways to find work on my own with no “middlemen”.
That’s a scam. Just like staffing companies.
staffing companies need to be abolished
Bro youre my news network haha, i greatly appreciate all that you share.
I STOPPED using UPWORK because it's indeed a TRASH.
You know these freelance websites are really bad, when even Indian devs complain they are bad
I literally got an upwork ad on this video
Again, you're doing a lot of speaking from naivety here, just as in the last video.
Upwork provides more services than just "the ability to apply for jobs". For example:
1. Most notably, a service it provides is "certainty" (if you've ever had to chase payments, you know what I mean already). For example, when you log hours w/ the Upwork app, your hours are protected; The client is obligated to pay for those hours by default. In order to weasel out of paying those hours, the client would have to prove conclusively (beyond the shadow of a doubt) that you were not working on their project for the amount of time claimed. Similarly, with milestone-based contracts, Upwork provides an escrow service so that you don't have to worry about whether your client can afford to pay you for the milestone that you're working for.
2. Another service it provides (for me, at least) is marketing. I don't know what this whole "connects hustle" is all about, because potential clients discover ME through Upwork, and send me invites to jobs they think I might be interested in. Paying for PPC, paying someone to market for me, or taking time to do it myself when I could be doing actual dev for $65-$105/hr. in the same amount of time instead is EXPENSIVE. When I get a new contract, I chalk the initial 20% fees up to $500 as paying a finder's fee. And it's a service I'm grateful for. I want to work on dev; I don't want to spend all of my time looking for clients.
3. Yet another service Upwork provides (at least me, since I do high-quality work) is a trustworthy, verifiable track record. I can make my own website and write a bunch of genuine testimonials, sure... But many future potential clients will still have that doubt in their head: "Well, he could just be making them up" or "He could be terrible to work with and just cherry-picked the good reviews". And this track record folds into Point #2, because it causes the marketing efforts to snowball. Upwork wants to recommend me to people because they win when high-quality freelancers keep billing on their platform, so they keep sending people my way. I can pick from the ones I want to work with, I usually get a good review, and then the snowball continues.
And your concerns about "being on top of the world and then having it all crumble" (basically) are unfounded. One of the perks Upwork provides me as a Top-Rated Freelancer is the ability to remove feedback if I had a one-off bad experience with a bad client: support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/219801228-Feedback-Removal
To me, you're really doubling down on wrongness here just to chase the views that appealing to popular (and poorly-justified) opinion brings. They say that "misery loves company", and the service you're starting to provide now is just a place for miserable people to come together and bring each other further down with their "doomer" outlooks on life. Seriously, look at the trends in the tone of your videos from a detached perspective. Look at trends of the attitudes of the people in your comments. Increasingly doom-and-gloom. So much of it that despite how ridiculous it is, the bandwagon fallacy might make you start believing the echo chamber of unjustified moping.
If your name is Wes Bos and you're giving tech conferences regularly, then yes, you will probably have a steady stream of trustworthy and reliable high-profile clients, without the need for the support of a platform. But some random dev, just going along on his own with no marketing experience, little legal understanding, etc.? Most of us devs who just wanna work on dev are in that boat. And a platform helps support the dream of just doing dev without being so worried about all the supplementary crap. A no-name dev with no proven experience will suffer, platform or not. But a platform eases that suffering a bit.
With platforms, it doesn't have to be a case of bad/worse or bad/good. Depending on your own individual circumstances, a platform may or may not make sense for you. But it's definitely not "objectively bad". For one person, a platform could be good, and working outside of a platform might be even better.
I subbed because you were honest, straightforward, and relatable, but I'm unsubbing now because it feels you're becoming an insufferably-negative doomer just to chase doomers' viewership. Your new audience of depressed shut-ins loves your "LinkedIn Cringe" videos because they're bitterly unemployed, and you've obviously been doubling down on things like that because you're following what works on your dashboard to try to keep your views (and thereby, income) high. Chasing views is causing your viewerbase to shape you rather than the other way around, which ironically destroys the authenticity that I originally subbed to see.
Oh, also, on your "how do you get started thing" -- Yes, you do the second thing you said; Start out with an underpaid job and work your way up, just regular dev jobs.
If you've already accomplished great things in a regular dev job and just want to move to freelancing now, you build your profile with an attention-grabbing "Big Fat Claim", spend another paragraph backing it up, and then put 1-2 sentences inviting the client in question to have a nice little friendly low-pressure fireside chat with you.
Oh, one more thing I had in mind while I was writing that wall of text but forgot by the time I was done:
"Circumventing w/o circumventing" is pretty easy to do without getting in trouble, esp. since US laws allow you to contract with a company as if it were a living entity. Let me elaborate.
For example, one of my Upwork contracts is creating internal tools for a specific DoorDash department. Do you suppose that I wouldn't be able to accept a job offer w/ DoorDash just because I worked with someone on an individual basis to create a department-specific internal tool? Of course not!
If you really want to get out of your 2-year exclusivity agreement, just create your own distinct corporation, and have it contract with your "client's" distinct corporation. You and your client are now, for all intents and purposes, "different people" than who the freelancer and client were on Upwork. As far as I can tell in scrutinizing the user agreement, nothing there prohibits "Josh" and "Steve" from communicating with each other outside Upwork as employees of the thin shell companies "JoshLLC" and "SteveLLC".
I've been using upwork for many years now and have over 300K in projects and I agree with the both of you. I do also think this video while technically correct about policies is still misleading. I still love Josh's videos and this isn't a reason to unsub even if I don't completely agree.
All those sites have their Terms of Services redacted like a protection racket 101.
Even Josh’s dog looks cynical. They BOTH make the “This is BS” face at the same time throughout the video.