Upwork Review

Upwork

URL: upwork.com


NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

Formed from the merger of Odesk and Freelancer, Upwork is now the largest individual freelancing site in the world in terms of volume of users and work. Unfortunately, the vast bulk of that ocean of work is cheapasses trying to underbid for their projects at ludicrously low rates.

In terms of payment, freelancers set their own rates, but you'll soon find that if you're not willing to work for two bananas and a handful of lentils per hour you'll find that you're priced well out of the budget of most clients. And even if you lower yourself to the insulting and abusive rates on offer, some dude from Pakistan will underbid you at a rate of half a banana and a handful of millet.

If you do manage to land a gig, Upwork will take 10% of your banana as their fee. They also only allow you 60 "contacts", or job bid proposals, per month. Unless you pay for a $10 monthly subscription, in which case you get an extra 10 bid proposals. At this rate, it will only take about 74 completed jobs to break even on your subscription!





SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

The one positive thing you can say about Upwork is that they are a solid intermediary. You will get paid your bananas ... IF the client isn't a nutjob and/or chiseler and doesn't file BS baseless disputes and refund requests.  The site TOS mandates that these disputes be resolved in 48 hours, but there are numerous reports of the process taking longer, and also worrying reports that the "experts" who handle them are actually unskilled freelancers in developing countries to boot. Visible and fairly detailed (by mill / freelancing site standards) feedback ratings for both clients and freelancers do help in screening out this possibility somewhat, but you're at the mercy of an apparently troubled system if things escalate to a dispute on either side.


INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

Oh yes, absolutely. Upwork wouldn't have a viable business model if they didn't allow basically anyone from anywhere regardless of their competency level or ability to offer value.





STARTING OUT

Tax information nor Paypal are required to get started -- in fact, if you're in the United States, with the new rules pertaining to freelancing I'm not sure if you're ever asked for a social or identity documents unless you earn over $200,000 from the site per year!

If you're averse to pictures of yourself, you should be warned that Upwork requires a "real" picture of you, or at least some human person -- no art or going without. You then simply fill out basic biographical information. You also have the option of taking a range of competency tests, the results of which are displayed to employers on your profile. The tests that pertain to writing seemed rather pointless to me, however, as you can quickly Google just about all of the answers.

It's then on you to search for employment postings and submit bid proposals, but the listings are often quite scanty on the details (many for writers do not even list the subject matter that you are expected to cover!) and searching through them is a chore. Compounded by the fact that most are offering insulting wages.

PROBLEMS WITH UPWORK

I've heard stories of Web developers making decent money with Upwork (or at least one of the previous incarnations), but there's also people who are ranked #1 in their category still struggling just to make a U.S.-viable living wage and eventually quitting out of frustration.

Full disclosure, I did not end up personally taking any jobs from Upwork, at least not as of this writing. That's because after a full evening of setting up a profile, taking some tests and poring through job listings, I determined that the common market prices being offered weren't even worth the time it took to read through the listings to get to them. The search feature is seriously lacking and the site is just beladen with way too much chaff, both on the employer and the worker side.

FINAL VERDICT - Almost No Potential

The one potential use I have for Upworker is as a third-party intermediary to offer to new clients that I make contact with elsewhere. I can't see chasing job listings on here actually being a profitable enterprise for most people, however ... even content mills come out well ahead as a use of time for writers!