<story><title>Why you should think twice about Freelancer.com</title><text>Freelancer.com has given me several projects and some very good relationships. I manage to have a very good reputation and charge much more than the average bids for the quality of work provided. So this is to explain why I suggest killing a stead stream of revenue!&lt;p&gt;I first noticed several projects involving money exchange posted on Freelancer.com and opened tickets having noticed this to be strange. This indicated a strong message - There is a major security issue that a set of people are exploiting. While I reported it in vain and felt sad for those who were going to fall for this one but didn&amp;#x27;t realize I would be the one to be scammed very soon.&lt;p&gt;I had several projects (all web development) I was invited to and paid for which were suddenly reversed without any intimation. The reason provided was that the payments were made using stolen credit cards which they somehow expected me to be aware of!&lt;p&gt;When I planned to move out of it is when I realized a bigger problem. I had grown as a freelancer and earned a reputation that warranted paying the fees that I did. I had built a level of trust that does not come with portfolios of hundreds of projects or testimonials from people on your website. Because, well, there is no authenticity.&lt;p&gt;But by growing within freelancer, I had neglected forming my offline network. I did have a good client base I had got from there but not enough to sustain without new ones as the work was never regular. I had missed a very important step : creating a brand for myself outside of a third-party platform. Ensuring a good client base outside and ensuring that you use these platforms to only supplement you.&lt;p&gt;After raising the issue of multiple reversals, I was contacted by senior staff and compensated with a subscription and promised that I could always check with support team to find if a user was genuine. Shockingly, I was no longer allowed to withdraw funds and the support team do not respond to any questions regarding the same!</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zwetan</author><text>I wasted some time testing those sites: freelancer, odesk and elance&lt;p&gt;here is my conclusion: whatever you do, you will always end up having problems with those kind of site.&lt;p&gt;Either the escrow can be reverted, or the site side with the &amp;quot;employer&amp;quot;, how about installing that odesk thing that take a screenshot of your desktop every few minutes ? and on, and on, etc.&lt;p&gt;I worked as a freelancer without such web sites for 10+ years (both in France and UK),
either solo by networking etc. or via an agent that was finding clients for me in exchange of a 20% commission (yes that&amp;#x27;s not a typo) and this was 10 times better that any freelancer web site.&lt;p&gt;So what is the real problem ?&lt;p&gt;you (the freelancer) are actually the product&lt;p&gt;so called &amp;quot;employers&amp;quot; can play the game &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s find the cheapest product&amp;quot;
(eg. let&amp;#x27;s hire a freelancer that can work for $8&amp;#x2F;hour in some other country)&lt;p&gt;you can not do any margin with a competition toward &amp;quot;cheap&amp;quot;
either you invoice per hour, so even if you do the job faster than someone else
you just invoice the actual hours, or you bid on a fixed price which is also a race to lowest amount of money.&lt;p&gt;It is absolutely a no-win situation&lt;p&gt;as an individual or a company
wether you&amp;#x27;re building web sites, applications, mobile apps, etc.
all those things have high values
it is absolutely OK to invoice more that the time it took you to do it
eg. make a margin to make a living&lt;p&gt;also those sites tend to concentrate &amp;quot;bad clients&amp;quot;
eg. the one who don&amp;#x27;t understand technology, why it cost so much to do this,
why you can not build something complicated in 10 minutes, etc.
exactly the kind of clients you try to avoid at all cost</text></comment>
<story><title>Why you should think twice about Freelancer.com</title><text>Freelancer.com has given me several projects and some very good relationships. I manage to have a very good reputation and charge much more than the average bids for the quality of work provided. So this is to explain why I suggest killing a stead stream of revenue!&lt;p&gt;I first noticed several projects involving money exchange posted on Freelancer.com and opened tickets having noticed this to be strange. This indicated a strong message - There is a major security issue that a set of people are exploiting. While I reported it in vain and felt sad for those who were going to fall for this one but didn&amp;#x27;t realize I would be the one to be scammed very soon.&lt;p&gt;I had several projects (all web development) I was invited to and paid for which were suddenly reversed without any intimation. The reason provided was that the payments were made using stolen credit cards which they somehow expected me to be aware of!&lt;p&gt;When I planned to move out of it is when I realized a bigger problem. I had grown as a freelancer and earned a reputation that warranted paying the fees that I did. I had built a level of trust that does not come with portfolios of hundreds of projects or testimonials from people on your website. Because, well, there is no authenticity.&lt;p&gt;But by growing within freelancer, I had neglected forming my offline network. I did have a good client base I had got from there but not enough to sustain without new ones as the work was never regular. I had missed a very important step : creating a brand for myself outside of a third-party platform. Ensuring a good client base outside and ensuring that you use these platforms to only supplement you.&lt;p&gt;After raising the issue of multiple reversals, I was contacted by senior staff and compensated with a subscription and promised that I could always check with support team to find if a user was genuine. Shockingly, I was no longer allowed to withdraw funds and the support team do not respond to any questions regarding the same!</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gregthompsonjr</author><text>I try to stay away from sites like that in the first place, because I see wasting a lot of time building a reputation before getting actual work. It just never made sense to me.&lt;p&gt;The sites like Freelancer and oDesk are saturated with highly competitive, cheap developers from Asia anyway. It&amp;#x27;s annoying. Nothing against Asians, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t try to dive into a pool of them to get work. It&amp;#x27;s unrealistic in most cases, because they eat up opportunity like machines -- in large numbers.&lt;p&gt;Better off just cold calling.</text></comment>