Upwork

I've been hiring freelancers for many years with my first full time freelancer in 2007. I've used all of the platforms and really liked Elance before they became (or merged into) Upwork. I can't see Upwork being a good solution for hiring freelancers in long or short term situation unless you just can't find the talent somewhere else.

My initial experience after Elance became Upwork was somewhere between horrible and bad but I stuck it out with the hope it would improve. When Upwork completely jacked the pricing up so high that it was no longer even worth it, that was strike 2.

I typically got more qualified freelancers through Upwork than others but with the new pricing and absolutely HORRIBLE customer service in the last few months, that is a huge strike 3.

Much higher prices with much worse service = I am happy to terminate all work through Upwork and use another service.

I found my web dev on Upwork and now he works full-time for me. That's the good news, it took about five tries to find him and one was a pure scammer. It's a caveat emptor world and if you're naive you'll most likely get burned. That said, there is some strong talent on the platform. Key to getting full value is to move your provider to a private platform and avoid the fees.

I used Elance for about 8 years before Upworks bought them out. Platform seems about the same. For the record, I've had my most luck with Eastern European coders and have had no luck with Indians and Pakis. The Russians can be hit and miss, I sense the stench of scam when I work with most of them.

Contact support. All they did was reactivate the same system. So i asked them to do it manually instead. They responded saying THEY couldnt verify it either and need more docs. I looked at the doc list and the first thing listed was MY ID! The same one no one can verify, even though it says OREGON across the top and has my name on it. Ive emailed back saying that im not moving forward to find addtl doc till they can assure me that my id wont be a problem.
If i had another form of id, i wouldve used it. For an easy app, this sure is complicated.

You could work through UpWork for 10 years and contribute tens of thousands of dollars to their profit and they could lay you off forever in a heartbeat based on their policy (after 10 years) or based on a whim of your employer who falsely reports you. If you built your freelance business solely on UpWork platform YOU ARE SCREWED my friend.

UpWork is just another example of evil corporatism. The fact that they make money out of connecting workers with employers for hard cash does not make them any different from weapons producers or oil companies.

They represent the evil nature of corporatism. They care only about their profit.

Yes, there are people who are trying to scam you here, just like any other freelance site. Yes, there are people who want to pay too low. You don't have to accept those offers. I put it offers with maybe 30 places, only got a couple answers, because I want a good price for my work. The last person who hired me ended up having a lot of work for me. I write questions for him, they take 5-10 minutes a piece, and it pays $5 a question. So, I'm making 30- 60 dollars an hour with this client. He has been very professional, very available, and I haven't had a rejection or a problem with pay. I have a full time job, and this is still easy enough to make an extra ~500 or so a month. Sift through all the bullsh*t and you can find some great work on here.

My partner joined up work as freelancer and received 5 starts for every job he did. He applied for multiple jobs and wasn't contracted to all of them so upwork indefinitely suspended his account saying that his skills weren't good enough! What the. That's disgusting, no support for freelancers, my partner is a graphic design student and charged bugger all for jobs he just didn't get contracted to some because he aimed too high, if he knew up work would do this he never would have applied for high skill jobs even though he actually is highly skilled just didn't have enough proof, this website is a disgusting discriminating piece of work! Very angry.

Had 2 -3 yrs work through this site as a photographer, a few big jobs 2000$+ so was quite happy but then had one client who took forever to decide on images and suddenly my account was under review which i had no idea what this meant.
Contacted them and all they could say was the same reply over and over, complete the job and account will be reviewed. So job finished and nothing. So contacted them and within 48 hrs they decided that my account should be closed. No explanation as why they thought that just closed. I have been a pro photographer for over 20 yrs so run a professional business so for them to call my professionalism into doubt really annoys me.at least give the elancer some feedback as why they think this. Happy to take my money when i upgraded my account now complete bastards when i ask wtf they are doing this. Luckily they are less than 1% of my income but it really f**ks me off how they have treated me.