[msadowski]

I was looking into this when I started freelancing on UpWork. I found that the best option for me was to have an US ACH account through TransferWise, otherwise I was looking at either high transfer fees, currency conversion fees or all of the above + a rate that is far off from the market rate.

With the current setup the only cost I have are the TransferWise fees for USD to EUR conversion when I send the money to my local bank.

[unnouinceput]

You "lose" thousands of dollars per year on Upwork no matter what you do. But this is a non-issue in the end, am I right? That's why I used quotation, because I prefer having this loss on a high volume of work rather than work for pennies in my country and saving transaction fees.

In the end I don't care about these fees, it's the world we're living in and I prefer to have fun with my projects instead.

[msadowski]

Instead of "loss" I consider it a service price for discoverability and the payment guarantees for hourly projects.

I also don't mind paying since so far it's been the best method to get projects for me so far.

[Ayesh]

Yes, the 20% definitely raises eyebrows. Uber charges 20%< Booking.com 15%, and Airbnb 5+10%, just to put a comparison.

I no longer use Upwork, and the "loss" is only one of the reasons. But it's probably the best way to find projects easily though.

[msadowski]

I think this depends a lot on what kind of projects you take. If you do lots of small projects for many customers and rarely charge them more than $500 then the charges are indeed terrible.

If however you do more long term projects (I have one active project that has been open for 2 years) then you quickly get to the 10% charge.

I wish they reduced the amount of money you need to earn to enter 5% charge range (it's currently $10k AFAIK) and I imagine it's quite rare for freelancers to get there.

What I think is quite bad on UpWork when it comes to charges is the 'connects' that you have to pay for since last year I think. Last I checked it was up to $1 USD per project proposal, which might make it very difficult for some people to get their foot in.

[unnouinceput]

Try going for long-term projects or creating relationship with your customers. Once you charge them more then 10k USD the rate is ~6%, which is quite nice to have 94 cents on a dollar. It's something Upwork actually encourages, opposite for Fiverr as example

[Ayesh]

If you reach 10K in payments, it means there's a good level of trust between two parties, at which point even the 5% charge is not necessary.

Their messaging and time tracking tools are mediocre at best, and they certainly aren't worth the 5% charge. Payments are held for a week, and it still costs money for the worker to withdraw them. Their local currency withdraw is 2-3% lower than Transferwise.

[unnouinceput]

I have no problem using their messaging, it allows me and my clients to exchange information and upload files too.

The tracking tools is just as it should be. I don't want a keylogger, so the fact that they simply count keystrokes and mouse clicks is good enough to not step too much into privacy zone.

Payments are held for a week in order to allow the paying customer to analyze screenshots, and if necessary to allow for complaints to be filed.

As for local currency withdrawal, I'd say they don't make a dime on that one at all. That's completely based on your local bank currency exchange rate, which is always skewed for them to make a buck too. Also they have plenty of different payment methods. And in the end it doesn't even matter.

Care to share any better online market for freelancers that you're happy with instead Upwork?

[unnouinceput]

That's exactly what I said in my words, no?