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Cesar R.

Contributor Level

Total Points
87

1 Review by Cesar

  • Thumbtack

8/5/17

Working through Thumbtack is really a race to the bottom in terms of quality of work and pay rate. You have to buy credits on their site. These credits are then used to bid on jobs as they come in. A total of 5 contractors get to bid on each job using their platform of email templates and / or your online profile. You pay around $1.50 per credit. If you learn to navigate the system, you can drop that to around $1.40 per credit. I work as a photographer, I have a really strong portfolio and competitive prices, and I've spent a lot of money for a small number of jobs. To simply bid on a photo job, it costs me a minimum of 4 credits. ($6) Several of the job bids are bogus, from looky-loos, or other photographers testing out the portal. (If a job positing is so clearly fake, you can request a refund, and you will get it after a few days, but that takes a lot more work and its not clear how many fake postings pass as looking real.) Often I have to bid on 4 to 6 jobs before I get hired. ($24 to $36 bucks!) I really cant imagine how photographers that dont have a strong portfolio and who charge more money every get hired. To bid on the more lucrative jobs, the cost is 8 credits ($12). Ive never been hired for any of the more lucrative assignments. Its a lot of work, the cost to use the portal is very expensive, and you have to put in a lot of hours to get the job, and then to complete the job assignment. Not worth the effort. Especially considering that the bids are often few and far between.

Old fashion networking and business cards / postcards work much better for me than this tech option.

Major complaint is Thumbtack does not stand by or protect its contractors.
So I obtained jobs by using the Thumbtack portal for over 1 year. My clients loved my work, and my ratings were so high that Thumbtack issued me the status of "Top Pro," something they only award to the top 3% of the contractors using their portal. Then, I was hired on a job where I completed a beautiful set of photographs, delivered bonus images with complete editing, over 50 photographs in total. Several weeks later, the client contacted me asking for more editing, around 10 hours worth of editing. I let the client know that the added editing was not included in the original bid and offered to complete the editing at a reasonable rate. The client then used extortion style tactics to pressure me into completing several hours worth of unpaid work, otherwise Id get a bad review. Needless to say, this developed into a civil dispute.

Rather than allowing us to go to neutral mediation / arbitration process as stipulated under their terms of use, Thumbtack concluded that I owed the clients a refund. When I refused on grounds that I honored the original agreement and had spent over 8 hours total on the assignment, they withdrew money from my bank account using my check-card they had on file for buying credits, without my authorization, essentially breaking the law. The customer service rep at Thumbtack that was overlooking the dispute sounded like a 12 year old. I know there are a lot of brilliant young women in the world, but the one handling this dispute happens to be a complete morons. They kept trying to send a link for us to communicate our dispute that would never arrive, when I made a phone appointment to speak with Kerri, it was some sort of cheap internet phone line that didnt work properly, had a lot of static and kept cutting off.

In short, this is a highly unprofessional company that all true professionals should probably stay clear from. Dispute is still pending.

Cesar Has Earned 7 Votes

Cesar R.'s review of Thumbtack earned 7 Very Helpful votes

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