Upwork

This site is a scam. They over charge freelancers then rate them on a very low scale.The job posts are all scams as no one every hires. I have placed dozens of bids and no one answers. The ones that have invited me to bid are scammers looking for free work. Horrible site.

I never thought I could but...

Within 3 days I got my first client and then 4 days later my second.
So the start was great.

Why I rated 4* is that Upwork takes 20% service charge. That's high already but they also make you buy "connects".
You need to buy "connects" to be able to send proposals.
I think this is unnecessary, given the size of their platform.

Not to end on a negative note, it is a great chance to build your portfolio and gain experience.
However, in the long run, I do not know how much of my earned money I want to throw at them.

I recommend it for anyone getting started and side hustling.

As a freelancer, the private and public feedback system is incredibly frustrating and unfair. Clients can leave you positive public feedback but also provide negative private feedback which factors into your Job Success Score. Freelancers have no way to improve their business and/or resolve issues with clients if they don't know what the issues are. Very unfair that UpWork encourages private feedback vs. asking clients to be open and honest with freelancers and then uses this information to bring down their scores and impact their ability to get future work. Also, much of the positive feedback a freelancer receives is excluded from the score unless it meets specific criteria like being given after a contract is ended and within 14 days. Many of my clients have preferred to keep contracts open for ongoing work but then this feedback doesn't count.

Be very careful who you hire on Upwork because if things go wrong, Upwork's powers of mediation are none existent, even if you present an infallible case!

Having raised such a case for mediation - due to freelancer unable to complete the job as agreed, as well as overcharging despite agreeing a fixed fee! - they simply didn't want to know.

It is my opinion that Upwork's allegiance is firmly with their freelancers who, lets face it, pay them a big commission (20%!) for each job they get.

So if they were to award in favour of the Client, it would dent their own profits! (where's the sense in that!?!)

Upwork mediation - Inept, toothless and bordering on unethical. Hence the review.

I was introduced to Upwork by one of my colleagues almost four years ago. I joined the platform and found immediate success. Infact, the experience that I gained from my early work here helped me in my conventional career as well. Four years on, during the pandemic, it helped me keep my savings intact by matching me with relevant jobs working from home.

Upwork have been running me around in circles for about 5 weeks now on payments, getting paid these days is quite the task at Upwork.

I give them all the docs they request (once again), carry out the verification (once again) and still waiting on payments.

The support for freelancers seems to be just a smoke screen these days, before it was not that bad overall.

But now it appears they are just playing games with freelancers and using every trick in the book not to pay out earnings after they take a huge slice for themselves.

Anyways I work not with Upwork anymore, the negative feedback I notice about them online is now at an all-time high.

If you want the real facts about Upwork you should read all the 1 star reviews they are getting. As "real persons" who have been involved with Upwork tend to write honest reviews.

Ive been using Upwork for a very long time and work with many freelancers at once. One of them made a massive charge on our account and will not pay us back. Upwork won't do anything about it. This is really wrong and unethical. Upwork doesnt really have your back when something like this happens... I'd rather trust other services...

I tried several online work platforms over the years and used a few of them.

Now I only use Upwork.
Yes., they have their issues, but no one is perfect.
Just because some people do not agree with a policy,,( I being one on the occasion), doesn't make it a bad policy.

Some of the clients can be out of line, yet I have always ended with a positive experience with the help of the customer service at Upwork.

Need work?. From home or even locally in an office, take a few weeks and try this platform.
Do not expect overnight results as a new freelancer, but once you get established with a good score,, people seek you out for work.
"try it, you'll like it"

I decided to believe in freelancing and turned to the best service in my opinion. During the first week I received my first order from a large baby food company.
I realized that my skills are useful and I can earn money from anywhere. Upwork is an excellent platform where I was able to prove myself as a professional on the world stage.
In the coming year, I want to transfer my entire team to work here.

I have had great success with similar platforms over many years so thought I would try Upwork. The developer ignored my entire requirements and just produced a single page that was more limited than our mock-up page. He managed to get me to pay half up front though and was demanding the rest! I tried to contact upwork about it and they passed it off to some other company for arbitration. They didn't respond for weeks and then asked a few obvious questions and then never showed up again. I cannot even leave a review on the project to warn others!
They don't care since they are holding my funds!
This is a total scam!
When I contact them they say they have too many claims to keep up with them so they cannot do anything!

I signed up to Upwork (still odesk then) in tandem with tour guiding; both freelance back in 2012. In 2013 we had a 7.2 earthquake, which stopped my tour guiding and I applied and found virtual assistance and translation jobs This gave me a security blanket that no matter what happens, I have a place to fall back on. Come 2020 and here I am again, but this time this is the online lifeline left. My biggest struggle before was to stay home, but now I learned to love it. Solo parenting even has become easier with working from home. Upwork is just and fair, I feel safe.

Initially UpWork delighted with a clean user experience and easy setup. Unfortunately you will quickly find they are good at billing you, but reluctant to pay your contractors. We've spent four weeks trying to solve a payment issue with a contractor who we had told we would be paying every two weeks. Horrible customer service has pushed us off and failed to take quick ownership of the problems. We are taking steps to move away from UpWork as quickly as possibly.

I've been doing some work for the past 6 mos with UpWork and during that time have been invited to work on jobs that were scams at 10 times. UpWork does pretty good trying to screen them but I think they could do better. Only thing is until a scammer gets a sucker some people may find it hard to tell they are job scammers. UpWork has a way to contact them and they answer pretty quickly so that's better than freelancer.com that scammers run wild on. It's too bad there are so many dishonest people. I just want to work a little to add to my disability but I guess that's too much to ask for in this troubled world.

I will skip the part about their huge fees which basically doubled last year, leaving a freelancer with about 70-75% of the money a client pays. I won't even complain about the stupid job completion getting ruined because a client left a contract open for possible work after completing the contract, and dropping my completion ratio for no reason and resulting in no more proposals.
What made me quit upwork was their overnight change in policy which requires a ton of information from me (a freelancer) that I refuse to provide - this is a completely unjustified invasion of privacy, I had no problem working happy with several clients without sharing my personal information.
And by refusing to comply with their overnight policies the money I earned fair and square are now blocked into their account - I have some doubts this is even legal.

Find another website, encourage competition to make things better. DO NOT encourage this trash.

They've really gone downhill since the merger a couple of years ago. I had a great experience with Elance and then saw that Upwork was nothing but a garbage site with $5 jobs, so I didn't transfer my profile.

Then they add insult to injury by upping the fee to freelancers to 20%, on a sliding scale: the more money you make with a single client, the smaller the percentage they take but you have to hit something like $1000 before you get a break. Since most jobs are one-off and under $100, they are killing their freelancers profit margins. Greed like I've never seen.

They also are having problems with hackers. They get into the site easily posing as clients and employers. NO FILTER system to keep them out. UpWork relies on the freelancers to spot the scammers. Disgusting.

If it's any comfort, the site is in real, not imagined, decline, per Alexa's website ranking system. See their graph attached.