Upwork removing 5% commission bracket and moving everyone to 10% bracket

Meh, that&#x27;s a dishonest title.<p>Yes, Upwork are moving everybody on the 10% fee. But they previously had a progressive fee:<p>* 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client<p>* 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned<p>* 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned<p>Those figures are per client. Start a new job with someone else, you start from the lower bracket again.<p>So they were basically living off short term contracts and low paid freelancers. Now it penalises everyone the same, but 10% is much more reasonable than 20%<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to stay afloat in this terrible hiring market through Upwork, and I&#x27;m ambivalent. Without it, I&#x27;d pretty much be broke. But even with a profile that has been created in 2012, has $50k billed, I&#x27;ve only been able to find short term consulting or sysadmin jobs paid terribly, and lost 20% off each of them because of the prohibitive lower bracket.

Why are they still afloat? Last time I checked you couldn&#x27;t find any work there:<p>- You could only find jobs if you were ready to underbid everyone else.<p>- The disproportion between the amount of work and job-seekers was abysmal.<p>- The platform did nothing to protect the workers from untruthful or exploitative clients (from anecdotal evidence).<p>- Upwork attracts clients who can&#x27;t find contractors any other way, mostly because of unrealistic compensation expectation, unreasonable requirements, or poor reputation. This leads to the average job being an underwhelming experience (to put it in generous terms).<p>Moreover, being on Upwork is a sign of desperation. You fear the day any of your regular clients notices and asks why are you there or just starts to doubt you.<p>The proposition of the service is very attractive, but I&#x27;m not sure if it brings more value than harm in practice. It&#x27;s very hard to find clients nowadays, but I&#x27;m still fighting the urge to restore my account there.

I have been using Upwork for years to outsource tasks. I&#x27;m still not sure what to think of them.<p>On the one hand, I keep coming back because I usually find the better freelancers on Upwork than elsewhere.<p>On the other hand, paying them 10% means a freelancer who works for me for two weeks works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee. And there are other fees on top of that. Upwork&#x27;s overall take rate is over 15%.<p>And what is super annoying: For every freelancer you work with, they send you 12 (!) PDFs per month. For each week, they send you: a) The invoice of the freelancer b) An invoice of Upwork 3) A receipt for your payment.<p>Even if you worked with a freelancer for years, there is no way to switch to monthly invoicing.

When I started out as a freelancer &#x2F; independent contractor, I made the conscious decision to not use any of these platforms, out of fear for my client base or finances being tied up and taken away from me due to a simple ToS violation; the fees never sat with me either. Admittedly, it took so much longer to get a consistent base of clients (1-2 years), but it feels like a fresh of breath air over having to rely on another platform to do right by me. Now I am at 0% fees, NET-14 and get paid directly without a hold.

I&#x27;ve had a good experience with Upwork as a buyer of Development, DevOps and Design Services. There are a lot of unreliable providers there, but also some really talented, dedicated and professionals too who seem to make a good living if they live in slightly lower cost regions.<p>We had a fairly complex client project, and it worked really well for bringing in fractional skills. 20 hours of a Spark expert, 60 hours of an Azure expert, 5 hours of someone to help install a certain tool etc. Better than hiring a generalist for a longer period.<p>I imagine it is challenging as a freelancer, but it&#x27;s a decent platform from the other side and adds value.

Sites like upwork, freelancer, fiver, etc are the worst places to find contract jobs. Its a mix of very desperate people and scammers, the quality is very low, and the rates are low - attracting the worst possible buyers. No one will see your posts unless you spend money, and it costs a lot. So you are better off spending your money and time on advertising your services and do networking activities in your local area. Use your social network to find referrers. Or work for people that are good at finding jobs

They must already be making a killing as they don’t do much; I mean their platform is so depressingly badly written, I don’t quite understand how you can get it to that state. They want (it’s in the rules) you to stay in their chat and communication system, but it is basically unusable for anything serious, so no one does. There is the impossible invoicing more people here mentioned; my accountant keeps asking if they cannot just send 1 invoice once per month that it is clear instead of the vague warble they send once a week.<p>Their ‘recruiters’ are just friendly community chatters who talk a lot to people with that automatically (you get them too in the recommended list) match the skills (in their profile; there is of course no way to tell if they actually <i>do</i> match the skills you need; I needed an AD expert for 1 year and the recruiter introduced me to the perfect person; in a chat they admitted to me that they had worked with it once a long time ago…).<p>This is ready for disruption. But not by something like Toptal. Which should be mentioned, if you want to talk about greed…

This is in addition to the % fees they also charge the buyer.<p>As a very long time user of Upwork since before the days of oDesk and Elance, don&#x27;t understand the greed here. They used to at least offer discounts on the rate when you had over $10K billings with a client.<p>This just increases prices across the board as contractors will raise their rates to account for the fees.<p>Silly as it gives their users motivation to give competitors a look, as well as a competitor to rise that doesn&#x27;t want to be as greedy with the now common Airbnb style of charging all sides fees.<p>Surely they got jealous of all the 20-30% fees relatively new services like Uber, GrubHub, Fulfilled by Amazon charges and figure they should get in the game as compared to their legacy thinking...<p>Wish they&#x27;d provide additional value and services for additional revenue, rather than continue to squeeze both sides of the transaction.

I lost believe to work via upwork to be honest. I have the profile 10 yo. and after the changes with connects to use to send for the dead job posts as result it&#x27;s really unfair. then they added more commissions and the rules are always changing.<p>I feel like now it&#x27;s better to search the job in LinkedIn via the connections and the jobs posts with Fast Apply option. I don&#x27;t promote LinkedIn but it&#x27;s more attractive for me for now.<p>Also what you get by paying the huge commission and timer that screens you? they don&#x27;t help you promote, autocomplete cover letters, what the real advantage in this case.

Upwork is the prototypical clown car that crashed into a gold-mine. (Or is it?)<p>Well it&#x27;s definitely a clown car. The product experience is comically bad (like sad clown comedy). There is incredible friction in the hiring and interviewing processes. API access is disabled unless you have a through-the-nose enterprise account.<p>I would die for a freelancer hiring platform that I could interact with programatically, so I wouldn&#x27;t have to use their shitty tools.<p>(Source: Hired through rentacoder, vworker, upwork, elance, etc.)

Coincidentally, I just became Top Rated Plus (as opposed to normal Top Rated) on Upwork thanks to finishing my first large contract! I&#x27;m going to have a mini-party with my wife to celebrate, haha. Upwork dramatically changed my life. I don&#x27;t care much either way about the fee change, but I get why other people do.

I have found a number of long-term clients from UpWork. In fact, working with one since last 8-9 years, around the time UpWork was conceived.<p>Although not so much on UpWork these days, I personally feel that having a single fee is less confusing then the so called &quot;progressive&quot; fee bracket.

It is mind-boggling how this business with $600 million in annual revenues is still barely breaking even on a free cash flow basis.

For reference: I was unfortunate enough to be a tech lead after a company got bought out by private equity. Their edict was “they don’t want to be a tech company”. I was forced to hire contractors through an agency.<p>They charged us at least 20% more than the contractor.<p>I also work in cloud consulting at $BigTech. I know exactly how much money I bring into the company at I know how much my bill rate is. The company takes much more than a 10% cut.<p>On a broader note: it’s easy to find out how much revenue BigTech brings in per employee and compare it to your compensation.

Wow, I thought they would honor the 5% charge till the end of the contracts but it seems they will go to 10% by the end of the year.<p>Since Upwork theoretically locks you in for 2 years with a client, I’m expecting there will be a small exodus of people with long-term projects . I’d much rather sort out invoicing myself and get paid through Stripe than lose out on extra 5%.

How&#x27;s Upwork nowadays? I tried getting some gigs there for 3+ years and got nothing. I had more success with r&#x2F;forhire and Craigslist and the good thing is there&#x27;s no middleman. Heck, I even spent for Freelancer Plus and I just lost my connects to people who didn&#x27;t even consider to read my proposal and check my profile

That&#x27;s a huge tax

Just love the whole intermediation model of... well, basically all the startups on this site.

I find it shameless that after a 10% cut on back of the worker, they make it complex and confusing by not just rounding down the amount of their fee.

Is there any good way to move upmarket from upwork?

The 5% to 10% bump is a real kick in the pants.