Hello, I will do my best to just state the facts and reasons to stay away from this new Freelancer policy. First of all, let's start with their policy that they stated when I contacted them and complained :

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Please be aware that under our Terms of Service(Amendment of User Agreement).

Freelancer.com may amend or modify this User Agreement in whole or in part from time to time, without notice, by posting an amended User Agreement on the Site or any linked information. Such updated version of the User Agreement will be effective at the time we post it.
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Now with this in mind (I won't go into the outrageous policy listed above), let's go back in time. Freelancer.com was a great place to post and find workers because of :

1. The refundable project fee. Pretty much for people that do not know, you can pay 5 dollars that's refundable when you : a) pick someone and finish the work or b) you don't find anyone on Freelancer.

Now, with their new updated policy, the option b is not available. As a result, you MUST find someone for your project or you lost 5 bucks. It doesn't sound terrible, but here's the thing with Freelancer.com from years of experience :

1. Most people COPY AND PASTE a message that's barely relevant to your ad
2. Most people do NOT read your description
3. The average (THE AVERAGE not everyone) work skills and credibility is VERY poor on the site

In other words, it's HARD to find someone who fits exactly what you need, and I oftentimes have to re open the project and wait even a week to hire someone decent.

I was so used to reopening a project when I couldn't find someone, and I was shocked when I didn't get a refund to post a new project (which is 5 dollars / project).

I'm not sure what policy was changed in the employee side, but I don't think it's much because I'm still receiving the major spam and useless PMs (I hide 80% of them).

I think there are a lot more policy changes, so I HIGHLY recommend looking at their new policy or policy related to what you normally do on Freelancer.com

I will be staying away from Freelancer.com and using solely other sites such as Elance. If anyone has any other good recommendations, I would love to check it out!

I hope this helped anyone who didn't know about the new policy or were thinking about Freelancer.com

AGSniper

guruCom can be an alternative. Check it out ...

odeskCom

I have been using them, I have liked using them.

I prefer oDesk and Elance for finding freelancers and selling services.

I had a bad experience with Freelancer in the past regarding the "refundable" fee when I wasn't able to find anyone I felt comfortable hiring. Initially my lack of refund was a glitch and later it was because my listing was against ToS but of course no details were given. I believe the only thing I did wrong as far as they were concerned was ask for my money back :/.

I hate the new freelancer rules and management, they was good but not anymore!

I've been using elance, and will continue using them due to their high quality Freelancers.

I'm also going to give odesk a try. It looks pretty good, and it gets a lot of traffic! Thanks for the recommendation.

The same happens on a lot of the freelancing websites, like oDesk and elance.

You need to be very specific when hiring, here is a great overview on how to hire a programmer: http://sivers.org/how2hire

For cheap seo work and highly skilled programmers ODESK is the bomb.

Freelancer is pricey and the quality of suppliers is crap compared to odesk.

Odesk FTW yeah I'm happy with them

Bummer, Ive got $25 sitting in freelancer, now what to do with it.

well i just warned everyone a few days ago as well
Freelancer >>> ripoff !
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackha...ce-ripoff.html

Originally Posted by g0g0l

AGSniper

guruCom can be an alternative. Check it out ...

guru.com is worst, dont bother spending money there. its worst compared to freelancer.

odesk and elance are the way to go.

I stopped using freelancer.com several months ago when they ripped me off for $60 in my account. I have since started using odesk.

Oh, I have an account in freelancer before but I stopped because a client chose me among other bidders but unfortunately my laptop experienced some technical difficulty so I know I cannot deliver the project on time so I told the client to just replace me before anything goes wrong. So me and the client parted ways beautifully but I noticed that I have a negative amount in my account corresponding to the amount of the client's fee for the project and they block me to bid to other projects unless I pay the amount that they automatically deducted from my account even the project has not yet started. How ridiculous.

Originally Posted by steptoey

Bummer, Ive got $25 sitting in freelancer, now what to do with it.

You can pull the money back out and withdraw it.

I've been using odesk and hired few people part/full time already. I'm so glad Freelancer did this or else I wouldn't have started using odesk.

Odesk is amazing. The quality of work and price is all great.