Good and Bad parts of freelancing on Upwork in 2024 | A Freelancer's Insight

Back when I started on Upwork as a freelancer you could easily start without investing money. If you got a job, Upwork would get a commission of 5%-20% from your earnings and 5% from the client. Connects at that time from your Premium plan which was around $10 per month would be enough for applying proposals for that month. Now things have changed in the last year. So I will go through some pros and cons of the status of the platform at the moment of recording this video

1. Cons

2. 10% Commission for freelancers on all contracts and 5% commission for clients. I saw news recently that they plan to increase the client fee to 8%.

Last year, if your contract was beyond $10k, you would just pay 5% of the earned amount. So it was a decent amount for large contracts. So the fees for freelancers have increased and for clients, they will likely be increased. And regarding the Premium/Plus plan you pay $20 per month and get 100 connects for which you can post proposals to about 5 jobs. To apply for more jobs it can take you some hundreds of dollars per month.

If I were to start right now, I am not sure I would use Upwork mainly because of the price of connects. I also am not sure if I would be successful. I recently found a solid freelancing platform with 0% commissions! Can you believe that? I won't talk about it yet because I only registered a few days ago but their web app is just perfect. I will post a video in the future if the experience of getting clients will be good

3. Lack of innovation. What has changed in the last few years? Almost nothing!

You might say that they added a project catalog and consultation. I would say that those are nice to have and not a game changer.

Since the joining between Elance and Odesk in 2014 and the creation of Upwork, they have been by far the big player in the freelancing world.

Did you know that according to Google they have about 800 employees? I replied to a post on LinkedIn that was about a large investor in Upwork complaining about their overall performance that they could easily run with 100 people and one should look at X/Twitter example where Elon Musk fired about 80% of the people working there.

They might have just become lazy.

I had discussions with some of the top earners on Upwork and we all agreed that their technical side is bad and they don't do anything about it.

I once was interviewed by a Tech Lead from Upwork about a programming position for their website. Their tech stack was old and clunky and the Tech Lead has not left me an impression of a very skilled professional.

4. The Expert-Vetted badge. If you're not familiar with Upwork badges they come in this order

1. Rising Talent

2. Top Rated

3. Top Rated Plus

4. Expert-Vetted

For the first 3, there are clear requirements and the process of getting them is automatic based on your results with the clients and the earned amount.

On the other hand, the last one "Expert-Vetted" gives me the feeling that it is subjective.

One needs to be invited and the terms for passing are not clearly described.

So if you are an expert in your field, you don't know the key requirements for getting that badge.

These badges help a freelancer stand out and might also improve ranking when clients search for freelancers.

5. Now let's go to pros

6. A large number of clients are on Upwork and it is by far the largest place with jobs posted on various domains.

There are also clients with +$100k spent and even over $1 million.

So you have a chance of getting one or more such clients and work on longer-term projects.

7. Payment protection both for fixed-price and hourly work.

If you work on an hourly contract and you log 40 hours during 1 week and the client's payment doesn't work they have something called "Hourly Payment Protection". It is a process where they review your time logged that one does with their time tracking tool and they tell you based on your activity during that time and other conditions what percentage they can cover from their own money.

I had a few experiences where they covered about 50% of the amount the client owed me. I appreciated that and I find it very helpful.

For fixed-price jobs, the client funds a milestone and the money goes to Upwork's Escrow.

Once you complete the work assigned to that milestone the client can release the funds and they will be available to you in a few days. Also if the client is not active for a high number of days after the freelancer submits the work for the milestone the money is also released to you.

So they have very good money protection terms for freelancers.