Chuck W.

I thought this was going to be a good site but after I figured out that I have to set a weekly budget for every service, and the minimum was $30 which would buy just one response to my quotes, my jaw dropped. I offer about 10 services through graphic design so I'm supposed to fork over $300 a week to get leads that may go nowhere? Forget about it!

But of course as I was reading these outrageous terms after submitting my first quote on a job, I started seeing no less than 12 new quote requests pop up in email. All time and date stamped within minutes. I've been on freelance job sites for years and this just smacks of fraud. Even horrible, phony sites like UpWork don't have this kind of traffic. Fake, fake, fake.

I signed up for a monthly subscription to 60/bottle of the Immune Shield mushroom combo. A few days before my next bottle was supposed to arrive I received an email saying they were out of the 60 count so they were sending me a 120 count FREE.
Now THAT is the way to keep a customer!

They are running ads for freelancers now so I clicked and started what I thought was a pretty decent process until I was abruptly shown the cyber-door. Since I was only in it for a few minutes, I knew there was no way they had checked my website or LinkedIn account so I sent an email inquiry as to why I "failed the assessment".

In the meantime I went over to GlassDoor where everybody who posted their reviews essentially had the same kind of experience I had: they too had "failed".

I then found out when I got my response from their "recruiter" (who wouldn't have passed their grammar or spelling test), that they were only interested in freelancers who can commit to 25+ hours per week based on an hourly pay and would work exclusively through them. But nowhere on the site does it give a visitor the option to KNOW what kind of pay or terms they offer. They want a commitment without even sharing the offer first. NOT a good way to start.

I've been freelancing for 19 years and never even heard of this silly site, but they claim to have the top 1% of freelancers in their tribe.

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.