Lindsay A.

Terrible site. I joined hoping it would be better than Elance, but it's possibly worse. Bottom-of-the-barrel job prices, you have to pay to do skills testing, and if you want to bid on jobs within more than one category, you need to pay for that 'privilege.' They obviously don't care about attracting or retaining professionals because of the awfulness of the jobs posted.

Freelancer isn't concerned with providing safe, secured, reputable employment to professionals at all. Instead, they only care about scraping their percentage off of the millions of poor-paying jobs that do go through their site. Like "$20 for writing 150 300-word articles. If I don't like your writing, I fire you."

Uhh, gee. What a great working environment! Don't you want to pay for the privilege of bidding on that fruitful opportunity?

There are so many unserious clients looking to pay nothing for professional-level work and so many people who are asking for spec work, and from what I know about the site, Freelancer does nothing to deter this.

After I signed up, I immediately started receiving emails almost hourly from them and because this was annoying, I wanted to change my email settings, but Freelancer doesn't let you do this unless you verify your phone number. I didn't want to give them my phone number so I emailed them, and they pressed for my phone number. I said I now wanted to cancel my account.

Guess what? You can't! There is no way to delete my account and after multiple emails to freelancer staff, they are still refusing to do so, and telling me that they'll "keep it open in case you want to return."

It's an unprofessional site that wastes your time and money. Avoid.

It's an unprofessional site with little good work to go around. If you're a writer/graphic designer, there are far too many unserious, cheap clients who want the world but are only willing to pay $20.

The system is set up to help clients, not freelancers. If you want to bid on a project (which most of the time costs you money by way of their "Connects" system) in more than one category (such as design AND marketing) then you have to pay monthly for a membership plan. It's just a blatant money grab from hopefully young professionals. But once you join, you realize the jobs are of such poor quality, there's no point even bidding.

Elance also seems to do nothing to deter spec work since SO many of the writing jobs I've seen plainly ask for spec work right in the job posting. Best to avoid.