Roban K.

For about $600.00 I ended up having 20+ offshore designers all generically copying the first two designs that I gave 4 or 5 stars. I had to get really specific (and directly message most of them) to get any of them to develop anything original.

There also seems to be a HUGE issue with fraud. Designs in my contest were constantly being withdrawn (or designers' account suspended mid-contest) because they were ripping off other designs as blatantly as possible and/or simply reposting designs verbatim. I did a little snooping and found that multiple entry level designers in my contest were taking designs from better designers (from within my contest) and posting them to their own profiles as samples, continuing the cycle of fraud into other design contests.

I'm savvy enough to catch this, but I worry for all the mom-and-pop shops out there who wouldn't think to thoroughly review designer profiles and catch the scammers.

There also seems to be no chat support on the site, which (again based on experience) is a clear indicator that they anticipate their customers being annoyed and don't want to deal with it, so it's easier to funnel everyone into generic support FAQs.

Ultimately, after a lot of legwork I was able to weed out the crappy designers and find a couple of good ones, but it was a messy process. This one time I used 99Designs will probably be the only time. I'll stick with real agency designs going forward, even if it costs a bit more.