Any Freelancer.com success stories?

Sites like Upwork and Freelancer have a terrible reputation, mostly due to undercutting.

However seems like Freelancer is another level of terrible, while Upwork is still useable.

Thinking of trying out Freelancer but wondering whether there are any success stories for software developers on there. Or whether there really is nothing good about it. Anyone had a good experience? What rates did you achieve and how tough was it to get your first task? How does it compare to Upwork, truthfully?

You need reviews to succeed on these sites. The more positive reviews the more tasks you get.

I don't think Upwork has a terrible reputation. And as said above, you just need (a lot) of good reviews in order to start banking more and more.

BHW marketplace would serve as the best alternative.
No fees apart from annual maintenance.

HustleTong said:

BHW marketplace would serve as the best alternative.
No fees apart from annual maintenance.

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This, and the fact that the audience is super targetted. If I did freelance full time, I would surely have made a BST thread instead of wasting time with freelancer and upwork.

I fail to understand one thing when you have jumped in to ocean why you would want to jump back in to a river?

HustleTong said:

BHW marketplace would serve as the best alternative.
No fees apart from annual maintenance.

Click to expand...

Gogol said:

This, and the fact that the audience is super targetted. If I did freelance full time, I would surely have made a BST thread instead of wasting time with freelancer and upwork.

Click to expand...

Do you think you can get good payment rates here on BHW though?

coldshowers said:

Do you think you can get good payment rates here on BHW though?

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You'll get much better rates here, as there's no middle man to take cuts. $30 is peanuts for BST listing anyway. I earn around $25/hr for normal php/JS based projects. If I was in freelancer (well, I used to be at one point of time), I would be getting $12-13 for the same work. Not to mention, there's so much competition there that you wouldn't be able to charge anything more than $20 lol (atleast it did not work for me).

Freelancer is for sure terrible. Some people out there would be undercutting your pricing by 90%...

Upwork is much better but as everyone suggested, you need reviews to get jobs which is very annoying at the beginning

Freelancer is a shit show where any client can dispute any payment and get their money back at any given time (not to mention that it's super overcrowded).

if you wanna bank as Software dev in upwork/freelancer you basically need to go for a low competition niche/programming language if you planning to do the normal php/js it won't be worthy but some golang backend , Rust + WASM Etc .. actually have some high rates 50$/h and low competition as the most of freelancers are more into web dev and python there's free money if you are in a less competitive niche i d suggest golang , solidity , Rust if you wanna get some good rates as a freelancer !

I used to work on the freelancer.com website, i tried before to apply for an upwork account but i always got rejected, anyways i started working on freelancer.com after a lot of searching got the first job and had my first good review, it wasn't that much of money at first but yeah, first experience, they guy who hired me at first kept working with me and kept giving me good reviews even tho the money was very low, what i noticed while searching for projects is there are a lot of scammers in the site that will make you do the work and afterwards they change all credentials and leave you with nothing and sometimes even worse, you lose money since for example you accepted a project with 500$ you will have 25$ or more taken from you as a fee, and they do that even before you get paid, so if the guy ran away with your money you will have -25$ in you balance, which you end up losing money and hours of hard work, and even complaining to them won't solve the problem, let alone the dev-scammers, which are not actually developers and they don't know anything they just try to get the job and push the client to pay then they leave looking for another fish to catch, that's my experience with freelancer.com and the best thing that it can be used for in my opinion is finding clients and dealing with them outside the site.

It all depends on your skills.
The programer teams i coworked with also awesome indian ones where all hired fulltime after 1-2 years on freelancer by mainly western companies.

Myself as a employer i need to make real proper research and use my experience as majority of service providers are scammers or low quality self educated service providers.

I got hired a few years ago by a guy out of Agrabahad India. He wanted a ghost writer. I was happy to do the work since getting hired in the US while pregnant can be a near impossibility. Now fast forward I go back on, had to set a new profile up, offer my services; graphic design, illustration, proofreading and ghostwriting ect. Now every job I apply to I'm either underbid by people from India or just find jobs that A. Want to pay peanuts or B. Are con artists looking for free labor. I'm not being racist here either, I just can't compete with someone offering to do a $500 job that takes min three days in one day for $75 or less. I get the cost of living different, I just can't work for that low of a wage when I've got bills adjusted to the US cost of living spectrum.

There was a guy in India who started a software company based on projects from Freelancer.com.