Why Freelancers Are Leaving Classic Platforms?

According to a Quora comment by Emoijah Bridges, a Freelance Blogger at Emoijah Bridges “I personally do not use Upwork, or I don’t use it as much anymore, because I have learned to utilize more powerful ways like cold-pitching as a more experienced digital marketer and writer. When I first started using Upwork, I used it as a beginning freelancer and I think it’s great for beginners, especially writers.

This post has been written by our community member from Discord. All content published without any modifications.

OptriSpace Team

Unfortunately, I would never recommend staying with Upwork for too long. First of all, Upwork now basically charges you to apply for jobs. You buy “connects” that allow you to submit a proposal. A job proposal costs you anywhere between 1 to 6 connects – most jobs are usually 2–6 connects.

Upwork takes a significant portion of your earnings in my opinion. If I make $20, I really only get $16 at the end.

Also, a lot of employers or potential clients on Upwork also expect freelancers to create work for pennies. It’s genuinely hard to develop long-term clients from Upwork sometimes”.

With the comment above and after further research, this actually saturate it all to the following reasons, but before that kindly keep in mind that the major classic freelancing platform still remain:

• Upwork
• Fiverr
• Toptal
• Guru
• Designhill
• goLance
• PeoplePerHour
• Craiglist

Now, the reasons.

1. Cost

Most classic platform now charges freelancers “Connects” to submit proposals. Jobs can cost between 1 and 4 connects, meaning trying to get yourself a gig can get a price tag (No free things even in Free Town). It used to be to a certain degree. I mean, you have to pay a freelance service fee. That’s understandable.

Now, you have to pay for every single connect/bid you use to send your proposals. Well, that’s something new. Meaning, there’s no single thing/action left on classic platform a freelancer can do for free.

So, let’s do some math just to get an idea of how much you actually earn as a freelancer using Upwork.

Let’s say you earn $500. For the initial amount of $400, you will pay a 20% fee. When your lifetime earnings reach $10K+, you will pay a 5% fee.

Let’s not forget that in order to win this theoretical $500 project, you had to use at least two connects (in the best case scenario). Actually, that’s the most optimistic scenario. Every freelancer knows best how many proposals it takes for him or her to win a project. One in two or one in ten.

Freelancer Plus membership used to be $10 a month and now it is $14.99. No more free bids/connect, that’s the point. You have to pay to play.

If you think you’re having a hard time as a freelancer on Upwork, you shouldn’t forget that your clients have to pay membership and payment processing fees too.

2. Poor Pay

It can be very disheartening to see post after post offering half, or less, of your rate being offered a gig. Go do a quick search on YouTube and you’ll see how many freelancers have had terrible experiences regarding low payout.

Every category is filled with low-quality services and gigs. After all, we can’t really blame those service providers. It’s what you can expect to get when you go there looking to buy services for $5. I’m not trying to diss any platform as a horrible platform or humiliate the freelancers who are already using the platform. I’m simply trying to show you that there are better ways to offer your services as a freelancer where you don’t have to limit your pricing to a fixed model, or work 20 hours a day as a slave, or give in to scam strategies, or pay the price with your health.

3. Poor Customer Service

Most classic freelancing platform focus their attention on their client rather than the freelancers, they listen to their complains and comment and most times do not have time for the freelancers. Freelancers have little to no protection. A freelancer on Fiverr once complained of getting his account terminated because the client make a wrong comment about him to customer service and the customer service didn’t ask the freelancer what actually went wrong.

Etienne makes a comment on Freelancing tips:

Fiverr takes money, doesn’t care of sellers, some pro sellers got back for nothing and still didn’t get money pending clearance. It’s a pure scam, they just shit on their sellers, even pro sellers get 0 support from them… I feel so bad.

Sarah H. also commented:

Fiverr, without telling me, removed me from search pages. After a week of noticing this and not complaining, assuming it’s a mistake or glitch, I opened a new ticket, asking them to tell me why. Then they got back to me and said it’s all fixed. I pressed more and asked them why that had happened and also why my statistics and analytics is all gone and I only get error messages. They ignored me and ghosted me and then a day later, I found out that my gig was not there again among hundreds of inferior gigs with much less ratings. I opened another ticket.

This time, they got back to me and said, sorry, your gig is under REVIEW due to some issues. Then a day after, they told me I must fix “misleading” information. There was NO SUCH A THING, NONE whatsoever. My 5 star gig that had been so popular and so “perfect” went under some BOGUS review all of a sudden, only because they couldn’t apologize to me or to tell me honestly that they f&&&ed up. I deleted 90% of my bio and made it quite robotic and impersonal just to satisfy them. It is still under review. I know they are doing their best for me to leave.

4. Scams

All freelance platforms have to deal with scammers, there are lots of report in which buyer (scammer) post a gigs, seller will accept and do the work and send it to the buyer only for the buyer to start making one correction after another despite loving the work sent just because they’re trying to prove smart and not willing to pay (this mostly happen under graphics design and copy writing section).

The only way forward for the seller is to contact the customer support, but just as we earlier know that the customer support works for the buyer rather than the freelancer. The case will be closed in honor of the buyer as customer support will says they can’t force the client to accept the job. Despite this, the client will still move forward by leaving a one star rating plus negative comment for the seller.

Lewis Parrott on Fiverr review

“How A Regular Order Quickly Turned Into A Hostage Situatioт”

While I’ve been using Fiverr myself (on and off) for a while, this particular experience relates to my girlfriend’s account, not my own.

(I’ve been advising her on building up a reputable account, and how to go above and beyond with every last order. Everything stated is her doing, I’m just an observer.)

In this case, she had just gotten another $5 order on her logo gig, which seemed to be like any other… or so we thought. The order was fulfilled in good time, and my girlfriend had even included a bonus logo concept as well as the source file (which is usually part of the more expensive package). The client “loved” one of the concepts and so we proceeded to send her the appropriates file sizes, as stated in the gig description.

Soon after, things got a little weird. The client came back asking for a social media kit to go with the logo, something that is clearly not offered as part of her gig. Against my advice, my girlfriend decided to deliver the additional work, despite not getting paid any extra for it. After that, the client responded with even more demands and some changes to the social media files.

At this point, she agreed enough was enough. Despite every effort to please this person, they were clearly overstepping their boundaries here. So, she sent the client a polite message: The next reply was the nail in the coffin. This is when the client went from simply overstepping boundaries to unquestionable blackmail. (The equivalent of taking my girlfriend’s Fiverr reputation hostage.) F*cking disgusting.

While she took some time to ponder a response and reach out to Fiverr support for assistance, the client did eventually go ahead and leave a 1 star review. Presumably this was to show her he/she wasn’t kidding. Soon after, while still waiting on Fiverr’s response to the support query, the client paid an extra $10 for the social media kit. Of course, the payment was accompanied by yet another threat.

At this point, all I wanted to do was go all Liam Neeson and hunt this person down so I could repeatedly punch them in the face. (Seriously, I would have paid good money for the privilege.) But, at the time, I still had hope that Fiverr support would step in and rescue my girlfriend from this PITA client.

Enter The *Almighty* Fiverr Support Team

When the response came back from Fiverr support, they told her they couldn’t force the buyer to accept the order. Okay, that’s fair enough. (Even though the buyer already accepted it, technically.) They also suggested drawing up a list for the buyer to show the work has been completed in accordance to the gig requirements.

Honestly, this reply just didn’t cut the mustard. My girlfriend communicated in her initial email that the client was trying to extort her for free work outside the agreed terms, by leaving a negative review if she didn’t comply.

Of course, it wasn’t really about the work, it was about seeking protection from an abusive client who was blatantly pushing their luck. Rather than acknowledge what the buyer had done up until this point, Fiverr immediately turned the tables on my girlfriend. Turns out, she was the one breaking all the rules. Because she had asked the client to change their feedback, she was no longer entitled to any help from Fiverr support.

You can imagine how we both felt reading this. Everything that the buyer had said and done prior to her last message was now being swept under the rug — as if never happened at all. Fiverr essentially chose to support a manipulative bully, leaving my girlfriend with a permanent stain on an account she’d worked so hard to build up. Case closed.”

Author: Moses (aka Morakinyo)

If you want to discuss this point of view – please join our Discord server.