Reasons to Avoid Using Freelancer.com

• by Alex
• in Freelance Sites Freelance Writing
• posted November 25, 2014

There are a number of very good reasons to avoid using Freelancer.com altogether for finding freelance clients. Likewise, there are plenty of reasons to avoid using it if you are an individual looking to get work done. The problems with Freelancer.com are nearly endless, and it is somewhat surprising they have been able to maintain their position in the freelance market. Let’s go over a few of those problems, shall we?

Reasons to Avoid Using Freelancer.com As a Job Provider

The primary source of income that freelancer.com receives is, ultimately, a result of the jobs listed by job providers. They bolster this income with money from subscription plans that contractors purchase and fees for jobs that are won. Without job providers, Freelancer would be dead in the water.

The problems with using Freelancer from the perspective of a job provider are as follows:

• Fees, fees, fees – Be prepared, if you are using this site, to pay for literally everything. Want to post a job? Get ready for tons of prompts to get it listed higher for additional funds (even though the post will not truly change in any meaningful way). Want to remove a job after you have posted it? Fees. Haven’t been on your account in a while? Fees for inactivity. The apparent greed of the operators of the site is simply stunning. Plenty of other bloggers and job providers have gone into the same subject many times over, with even more information being tacked on in the comments.
• Inept employees and customer service – It is apparent, even after one or two interactions with the staff at Freelancer, that they are simply unable to handle even the most basic tasks without escalating them. One individual wrote a long blog post about how she nearly lost her entire livelihood due to that ineptitude. The employer who had listed a job on Freelancer, in her case, was unable to even take their money off of the site to use in other business when Freelancer refused to allow the job to be completed properly (due, again, to their own inability to even recognize a legitimate U.S. driver’s license).
• Poor quality workers – If you expect to find anyone of high quality on Freelancer, think again. Unless you somehow find someone who is (legitimately, actually) from a Western country, you can forget about getting any kind of quality work. This could be misconstrued as being an affront against foreign workers. It is not. It is well known that very low quality workers (and, quite often, scam artists) will make accounts on Freelancer simply to scam people out of work. They will not fund the escrow for their work and prey on new contractors who do not know how it works yet. Freelancer is entirely aware of this and do nothing to stop it. Something as simply as requiring an escrow to be funded prior to allowing jobs to be awarded or verifying identities of job posters would completely solve this problem, yet they refuse to do it.
• Fake milestone payments – Be readily aware that if you work with a contractor on Freelancer who you do not already have experience with, there is a high proclivity for individuals to “cut and run”. Don’t be fooled by the apparent safety of milestone payments. Settle for “all or none” the first time (or few times) you work with people. A lot of times someone will take a % of the payment through a milestone and simply quit working on the job. This leaves you holding the bag and having to pay the full fee too someone else for new work in addition to the amount you have already paid out for the milestone.

Reasons to Avoid Using Freelancer.com As a Freelancer/Contractor

Though most of the funding that the site receives is a direct result of the providers of jobs, without contractors being present on the site there would be no reason to post a job there.

Here are the problems with using Freelancer, from the perspective of contractors:

• Fees must be paid up-front – This is contrary to what most sites do. As soon as you win a job on Freelancer, they start collecting fees on that job. This happens before any job is done, before the job is confirmed, before any escrow is funded, and before you, the contractor, are paid for anything that you have done. Most other escrow sites, including Elance and ODesk, collect the fees once the job has been completed and the contractor has been paid. You owe them for having completed work, not for the privilege of “possibly being able to complete work”.
• The economy is a disaster – Due to the low quality workers that permeate the site and the number of scams being posted regularly, it is a hotbed for very very low payments. If you get lucky enough to land a job, don’t expect it to pay more than $1-2 per 500 words. It is even worse for other fields they offer (design, programming, etc).
• Payments can, and often are, rescinded for no reason – One of the most recent things that has come to light is that, even months after a transaction, a job provider can complain and have a payment reversed. This has been talked about at length by multiple people and, in particular, in this topic on Reddit. Another blog talked at length about Freelancer taking money from them was discussed here. Here is a post on Reddit on the freelance subreddit which goes into this at length (and partially inspired this post).
• A single bad review will tank you – Much like the tests we all took in grade school, a zero will bring your average down from 100% to 75% pretty quickly. Unfortunately, on Freelancer, if you do not have 100% 5 star reviews, you will be fairly unlikely to get work. This would not be an issue if your clients were trustworthy, in most cases. If the reviews were provided by an arbitrary individual rather than one of the individuals involved. The problem is: job providers know how important your reviews are and they know that they can use these to, in a fashion, blackmail you into doing extra work for them or providing them with a lot more work than you signed up for. This happens with extreme frequency. This is the same issue that comes up with Yelp! and other review sites. If an individual knows they can leave a review which will negatively affect you, they can use that information to try to get special service, cheaper rates, or more work in exchange for not leaving a bad review.
• Projects are deleted regularly with no notice and, in fact, can be posted with no evidence of efficacy to begin with. Also, massive amounts of scams – This is the big one. It is also the reason why the site is so full of scams and fake jobs. You can make an account and post for free. You can post without ever having filled up an escrow. You can post jobs violating their own ToS and they will allow them to go through. This results in tons of scams, fake jobs, deleted jobs, and all sorts of other issues for people on the contracting end. At least 3/4ths of the jobs on the site are either fake or will be deleted at some point. Of course, that is hard to prove, since they look just like the other ones. There are plenty of posts online outlining issues like this as well. Here is one. Here is a forum post talking about it (in which someone defends Freelancer and, in the defense, even admits that “hundreds of jobs” are fake).

Personal story time: I used to do work on Freelancer. The day I stopped is a day that I remember quite vividly. I had won a job to do some work for an individual who had a good reputation on the site. As usual, the fees for the job came due and my account immediately went into the negative (I had learned a long time ago never to leave money on the site, lest it be taken as some sort of fee). I went to message the individual who I had won the job from to begin work when I noticed that the job had suddenly disappeared. It turned out, the job had been deleted by moderators for some sort of violation of the terms of service (ToS) on the site (what the violation was I still do not know). The interesting part, to me, was that even though the job had been deleted and I could not complete it for any pay, my account was still in the negative due to the fees. Upon messaging their customer service I was told that it was my own fault and that I “should have known better”. In truth, why would I expect a job to be posted which violated any ToS? Simply by the fact that it was posted, it should have been clear from any of that. Their customer service, three times, gave me canned responses. Then they informed me that the fees would not be refunded because it was “my fault” and “not their policy to refund fees”.

In summary: Freelancer charged me fees for accepting a job that they allowed to be posted which somehow violated their ToS and which was subsequently deleted. Even though the job had violated their ToS, they allowed it to be posted. They allowed it to be bid on. They allowed it to be awarded and accepted. Then they issued fees and deleted the posting promptly. The part that gets me, and that I firmly believe is true, is that for all I know, Freelancer posted a fake job on their own site just to trick someone into accepting and paying them fees. I didn’t pay them. I never will. Neither should anyone else who gets set up in this way.

Final Thoughts

It occurs to me as I write this that it may seem biased. In truth, it partially is. I will readily admit that. Even so, I used freelancer.com for a short amount of time before I began to encounter “real” problems, such as the ones listed above. Even prior to encountering those issues, however, some things were very clear:

• The quality of work on freelancer.com is very low – Most of the individuals working on freelancer.com are somewhere between a little bit below average in terms of quality, and very far below average. This is simply because the stringent requirements that are found on some other freelance sites are simply not present. The nature of the site itself promotes undercutting in terms of cost and drives away anyone capable of doing quality work. The site itself is, primarily (and contrary to what they portray), used for individuals to get their foot into the door of the freelance world before moving onto a site that is worthwhile (and that requires anything at all in terms of reputation). If you are a job provider, it is extremely unlikely you will be able to find someone who is worth hiring that is also willing to work for the extremely low rates and put up with the unprofessional staff of the site.
• All of the risk is on the contractor – Any and all risk with doing work on the site is entirely on the contractor in every case. If you are the victim of a scam that Freelancer allowed on their site, that is your fault (according to the site’s administrators and customer service). If you accept a job and it is deleted, you owe the fees even if the job was allowed to be posted with a ToS violation. If you do great work and the client decides to put up a fight about paying you, too bad (according to the site’s administrators and customer service). If you end up having your client get you with scope creep once you have accepted the job, too bad, you will have to pay the fees and do the work. In every case, the site will not side with the contractor (this is something that is very publicly known). Even as a job provider on the site, you can have your funding tied up due to their confused and mismanaged escrow system. Once your money is on the site, it is usually there to stay, for better or worse, unless you put up a fight in public (and get some traction).
• The very low rates on freelancer.com (for poor quality work) affect the entire freelance work economy in a negative way – Freelancer.com sets no rates for their site in terms of the work listed. This is both good and bad. It is good because it allows the market to set rates for itself based on what work needs to be done. But, since the rates on Freelancer get undercut by less professional or lower quality individuals, it makes the overall rates look low across the industry. When you see someone offering to do 1000 words for $1, it is hard to convince them to pay $20 for the same amount of words. The truth is, people see the prices and do not think of the quality. Once you see that price, it is set in your mind as industry standard. This messes up the system for individuals who provide a higher standard of service to their clients.
• Free samples of work – There is a growing trend of job providers asking for free sample work from clients for no pay for the privilege of applying for a job. Freelancer does nothing to curb this and, in fact, seems to advocate and promote it. In this way, hundreds of individuals have given out free work for jobs that likely aren’t even going to be awarded to anyone. This has been talked about numerous times, including an entry in this blog by Lisa Martin which also goes into their ridiculous fee structure.

These issues are enough, by themselves, to avoid using freelance.com either as a job provider or a contractor. The issue is: You won’t get what you want. That is the average scenario, according to multiple sources and my own experience. At worst, you will basically have money taken from you with zero recourse and end up with nothing to show for it. Recommendations? Don’t use it. This might seem like I am saying “go switch to Elance”. I am not. I wouldn’t recommend doing that either. For freelancers, of every type, your best bet is to jump into the deep end and learn to find clients on your own through direct pitching, referrals, and personal marketing. If you are unable to do this, you will find yourself in hot water when it comes time to move forward in your freelance career. Having “real world” clients and a solid portfolio of work that you can point to is infinitely better than anything you can hope to achieve on an escrow site.

For a little bit of additional light reading on the subject, here are some reviews of Freelancer.com:

• Sitejabber has reviews directly from users. Over 370 one star reviews have landed Freelancer a 1.4/5 rating.
• The subreddit /r/freelance on Reddit.com has a number of posts about how bad Freelancer is.
• Here is an extensive blog post about the ineptitude of the staff at Freelancer, again involving their inability to verify an identification.
• Here is a, maybe blatantly, biased and positive review of the site. Looking at the comments you will see only 1/5 star reviews outlining their terrible service.
• TrustPilot user reviews reveal another slew of 1/5 star reviews.
• Reviews on ReviewOPedia are, again, around 1/5 stars on average. They also implicate the company in fraudulent activities.
• Lisa Martin, one of the Freelancers I cited in this article, also has this article up, which outlines some of the scammers she has found on the site.

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