As a client, what are my alternatives to Upwork?
replies(6):
There's also:
- PeoplePerHour.co.uk (UK based, not sure of international presence)
- Freelancer.com
- Toptal (but I think they have some sort of approval process that may be a bit arduous)
- Guru.com
- Codeable.io
- Outsourcely.com
- Truelancer.com
- Konker
- Servicescape
- Solidgig (but stronger for design and marketing/SEO roles, I think - considered dropping into the category below)
- Hubstaff Talent
- FlexJobs (but more oriented toward IT and accounting than software development; again, considered dropping into the more specalised category below)
Additional specialist companies I'm aware of that target roles other than developers:
- 99Designs (for, you guessed it, designers and UX) - https://99designs.co.uk/
- Savio (market researchers) - https://savio.pro/
- F-LEX (legal) - https://flex.legal/
Hope you manage to pick up more work soon, but also that you manage to get yours and your clients money back from Upwork.
> there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads
I’m guessing that Upwork is not a YC company.
And I used to work for a bank which took years to put password reset online, despite it being 25% of support calls. And we only operated in one province.
Companies would need to fundamentally change their cultures to fix this kind of issue as often the team doing the dev isn’t even aware of the support issues it creates.
Nobody on the IT team even knew password reset was 1/4 of support.
I know it's not the same issue, and the creds obviously came from somewhere else, but the amount of fishy reports I found just searching them here on Hacker News means I will never go near them.
Excuse me, WTF? You have to code something in order to get verified? (!)
Yes, of cause? If you can't pay for the support you need to provide then you need to raise prices. Imagine a logistics company complaining that they would be overwhelmed by the cost of fuel.
But of cause Upworks has no benefit to raising prices for their services, as that would make competition harder.
Freelancer.com is the nearest. The rest are doing very diff models. TopTal doesn't even belong on a comparison list.
If a logistics company most of the time didn’t need to buy fuel and sometimes just didn’t deliver if it required too much fuel, plenty of people would still use it if it were cheap.
The likely cause for their ban is going to be KYC getting around to review and money laundering regs/insurers demanding a certain course of action - cessation and seizure, possibly a report to relevant LE.
Platforms like eBay and upwork - anything where there’s a transfer of money between two third parties - have an enormous duty of responsibility around laundering and fraud, and even the slightest suspicion will result in a ban.
Example: A big corporation done something wrong and you want them to make things right. You only have $2000 budget and so big corporation will not be able to use more than $2000 for their defence. If they have any lawyers on retainer etc they won't be able to use them either.
If corporations would like to spend let's say $1m on defence, they would have to give claimant $1m to spend on their claim.
And then won't release it without a court order.
However it is typically pretty easy to get a court order, because they won't fight against you in court. They just want a court to tell them to release the money, because then any money laundering isn't their fault - they're just doing what the court asked.
I'm willing to have to scroll past one person's headache in the hope that if I suddenly lose my XYZ account I will be able to get redress through the same avenue.
I’ve seen it happen, with bank accounts, and sizeable sums of legitimately obtained money. HSBC sat on several million dollars of a friend’s business for two years - they couldn’t make payroll etc., and resultantly folded. They ultimately got their money back, but it took a fortune in lawyers, court visits, etc.
This kind of action by companies should be criminal, because they just destroyed economic activity worth at least $10000, because they didn't want to spend a little more on due diligence. Which could even have been put up as a bond by their client. My guess is that it would have cost <1 hour's work to validate this guy, and obviously he would rather bond that than lost the $10000. But no.
After you get in, most of the jobs you get are strongly limited to your particular skill (so you won't be able to see what coding jobs are available if you're a designer).
Then, the customer aquisition process is slightly different, as you don't talk straight to the client while you're „bidding”, but with a recruiter, who deals with selecting the right candidate for a job.
Finally, for most of the jobs you don't even have to _apply_, as recruiters constantly send you messages for potential jobs.
Now, upwork & freelancer are mostly a race to the bottom; I personally got banned from upwork for having the audacity to apply to jobs and not winning any (because I didn't wanted to work for peanuts).
Arbitration.
Unfortunately, it’s getting easier for companies to replace mandatory consumer arbitration with liability caps (or get folks to opt out of arb), which leaves one SOL.
The problem is that instead of actually solving the issue we are normalizing the idea that if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment while everyone else gets screwed.
If you're on YouTube and have a massive audience or are friends with someone that has a major audience you may be spared the wrath of a rogue AI that decides you're violating some community guidelines.
If you're on Twitter and happen to have followed the magical sequence of fellow accounts you'll be allowed to keep your PayPal account after making enough ruckus.
If you're on HackerNews and get lucky at 4 AM on a Saturday night before the mods wake up you'll be allowed to keep your $10,000 in earnings.
I don't like the idea that unless I'm cliqued up on YouTube, Twitter and HackerNews I "deserve" to get screwed.
I agree as long as that takes into account the fact that their system failed enough to warrant needing to go to HN in the first place. All too often we see something like this blow up on HN, get "resolved" and then the takeaway is "oh, I guess XYZ company really handles stuff" when in reality there are probably hundreds or thousands of other cases that weren't fortunate to get to the front page of HN to bubble up out of the AI support hell.
For Google to make profit, they can just close your account and not hire humans and train them with enough internal organisation knowledge to politely and humanly handle these issues.
Better profit is to have automated/AI based system that closes accounts based some user reporting - which can be easily gamed.
Bitcoin is not an escrow, and crypto escrow is a joke for contracting - by the time you deliver the crypto value could be off insanely.
But yes, jurisdiction is an issue, however damage can be done; they don’t want to lose EU and these are violations of our laws so they should be hit hard.
But if upwork really wants to implement coding tests they have to do it BEFORE assigning customers to the developer. Especially before $10K have been spent.
a) OP is stuck in a cycle where he's inquiries are managed by bots and no human is actually verifying the claims.
b) OP breached the terms in a serious way and UpWork is not being transparent as of why they are deleting his account.
UpWork offers a lot of services for both freelancers and clients (escrow, payment protection, guarantees, etc), that's why they handle the money and keep them on platform until the job are completed. Freelancers know that they will get paid if they get the job done, while clients know that they money are safe if the freelance doesn't deliver. It's a trusted middleman. I don't see how bitcoin can solve any of these issues.
You’ll likely also be awarded interest and the court-appointed interest rates are nothing to sneeze at (they’re based on the banks base interest rate plus a few percent)
Edit: went and looked it up: Interest is applied from the point when the defendant received the court papers and is currently the base rate plus 5 or 9 percent points.
If these kinds of posts are disallowed here, the companies are not going to go: "Oh, our customers cannot get redress on Hacker News, so we better improve our internal customer service processes". They are screwing up their customers regardless of where redress is to be found or not.
Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.
I don't either, but that's such a fundamental part of the human condition I have no hope of it changing before I die and I couldn't afford to lose $10k.
Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system. It seems like we do better when we can put a face and a story to a problem.
When I say it tells me something, I mean I get a first impression. I do not get a significant amount of information to have a settled opinion.
I registered for, and received the payment through, their merchant account, but later found out I did not qualify for it since I was not in the US. I understand if their fraud detection systems flagged something, but all they needed to do was to talk to the client and verify that it was a legitimate payment.
They have refused to release the money to me, or to send it back to the client. They also disabled all my Intuit accounts, some of which I had paid a subscription for.
"Publicly" in the sense of: Can be found via google.
The omission of the exact reason is intentional - as an example, I distinctly remember seeing the same mistake appearing on photoshoped passport scans over and over again. If the exact reason would be told, bad actors could exploit it more easily.
With that said, this policy also causes false positives. The goal is to exclude as many bad actors as possible, while minimizing the number of false positives. But there will be always false positives unfortunately.
It all started with a final meeting with the CEO - the bald Greek guy with the same first name as me, who spent almost an hour of his (not so) invaluable time for the sole purpose of pushing me to drop my rate from $45/h to $40/h. Ultimately we agreed, but on the condition that it is a 20h/week assignment, so that I have time for properly paid work.
3 weeks later I got fired for only doing 30h/week. Even back in the day, when I first read the e-mail I chuckled :D :D :D
We have a few clients in the US and I’m always factoring in this issue when making contracts with them. If they decide to not pay a small to medium sum, collecting it will be impossible most of the time if they don’t have a subsidiary in Germany.
All this means is that the losing party must reimburse your costs. Your lawyer is going to ask for money while the case is ongoing. So you need to have some serious money in advance.
People "deserve" things in our world for far far more arbitrary reasons than what you give here unfortunately.
Yes. We get it. And without doing that companies like upwork would have it prohibitively expensive to stay in business. And maybe for a good reason. That’s exactly the difference between any semi-large consulting agency and something like upwork. The former has people on payroll who can vet the client and the supplier, but due to that, there’s only so much business they can turn around. And then there are those companies like upwork who pride themselves with shit like “how we support 50k suppliers per one support staff member” (I came up with this particular one but it’s pretty reasonable for that to happen).
I mean, come on, it’s like your local traffic law enforcement agency sent you a letter:
Your driver’s license is now suspended and we are sorry to inform you that you have no recourse, you can never ever drive again. We cannot tell you why. All communication from you will be ignored. G’day.
Same, no? How the f** is that legal. The fraud is NOT my problem, it’s upworks problem. Get us on a level playing field. Provide a method for your client and supplier to sort it out using a transparent legal path. Same with google, facebook, twitter, whatever. And if the company cannot provide that, well, maybe their business is dubious. They can ruin you on a whim! And you have no recourse!
Never went back.
Some years ago, one of my client went out of business and I wanted to give upwork a serious go, as I already had _some_ projects there, the account was verified and such.
Start applying on jobs that matched my skill set, asking for my regular hourly rate (hence the audacity). Looking backward, my requested rate wasn't even that high, but that's a story for another time. :)
Dunno how they work now, but back then they had a certain amount of credits every month that you could use to apply to jobs. IIRC, you could apply to 10-15 jobs every month with those credits.
Which I did.
I applied to about ten jobs, on most didn't had any replies from the client (they either closed the job or picked someone else), but the gist is that I didn't get any job.
One day, I get an email where the gist was: you weren't able to get any clients with your credits, so we don't need you. Same as OP, tried to contact them, but the decision was final and that's that. Fortunately, I didn't loose anything but some internet points :)
You're just describing being well connected, which is nothing new. It's not 'a magical sequence of accounts', it's being part of a community.
> if you're in XYZ group you'll get proper treatment
This still beats "XYZ group" - in this case, someone who is
> stressed about the situation and being without electricity due to the war
being ignored by us as well as by the company that's meant to be the middleman (to clients who had no issue paying them directly - so clearly a problem with UW and not any other party)
> I "deserve" to get screwed
No one does, which is the point. Highlighting when companies' customer service fails users (and how they deal with it - sweeping the pattern under the rug versus resolving to address it) helps people make informed decisions about the companies they do or don't choose to work with.
While 'anecdata', it's still a more far useful metric to me than advertising in picking who I support, as patterns tend to arise (both positive and negative!) resulting from a company's culture.
Yes, and this is a complete tangent from your main point, but I worry about over-using the justification of destroying "value" versus destroying other people's "property." Not all things that "destroy value" are or should be criminal.
My favorite example: I own the only gas station on a busy corner and sell gas for $5 a gallon. My gas station is worth $1 million because of its money-making ability. Someone else opens a new gas station on the opposite corner and sells gas for $4 a gallon. My revenue drops, and the "value" of my gas station falls to $0.5 million. The competitor "destroyed value." Yet that's not only not criminal, but it's exactly the kind of competitive behavior a free society needs.
Same guy posted a nasty review on my profile (like as if he was a client) after I refused to install the tracking software which was only mentioned in the on-boarding document and never during the interview process.
I only learned about it a few years later when I wanted to use my profile and realized it had a negative review. I couldn’t remember at all even doing any jobs.
I emailed support and they accidentally spilled the beans. They said “do you remember working with so and so.” I couldn’t even remember. Google the name. Oh, it’s CEO/CTO of upwork. Great!
This was circa 2011 I’d guess, just when they were rebranding from oDesk to Upwork and rewriting lots of Perl, which I was big into back then.
This part is usually solved with escrow systems so the scammer wouldn't get anything until the client confirms they're happy, so why isn't that what Upwork is doing?
maybe a Help HN! subsection could be created?
where people who work for the companies users need support from could gain +25 karma for helping out, or something
That said, customer-support-of-last-resort threads have been so repetitive lately that we started downweighting them more in general.
I was going to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816 and then I saw that it was the reply I posted to you last time! Nothing has changed since then.
This is when it's particularly helpful to have only one thing we're optimizing for [1] because it means we can replace that question with another: would it make HN more intellectually interesting? The answer is clearly no, I think, because those threads tend to be so repetitive.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
You did something against our terms and now you're banned. We will not tell you what was the offending Tweet though ...
I was hoping Elon Musk would change this, but I don't believe anything changed regarding this issue yet. I think there's probably some legal reasons why companies follow this approach.
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[0]: https://arc.dev
The problem is that we are often not the ones paying the companies we are shaming and therefore we don't affect their bottom line very much. In this case I don't think the vast majority of folks on HN are the ones hiring people on Upwork.
> If these kinds of posts are disallowed here
I'm not advocating that, really, I think the current "system" that HN has works pretty well. If it becomes a problem users will down the content hard enough that @dang and folk can figure it out.
> Maybe this is a startup opportunity: pay a fee to have your issues with company X broadcast on the social media that will be most embarrassing to them; hopefully you get redress soon.
It's an interesting idea. I suppose it depends on if the vast majority of users are interested in following a social media presence that more-or-less only puts out messages about companies doing bad things. I think major outlets like Consumerist have had success in this area in the past. The difference is that their signal-to-noise ratio is much lower and they usually only raise a ruckus about something when it directly affects thousands of people. If I'm little Timmy that needs to raise a ruckus about my GMail account being banned and I'm paying $20 to said startup to do it, they would be flooded with a lot of "news" about people getting boned.
I agree and I'll never say that people trying to solve these kinds of problems on social media networks is deplorable or pass judgement on them. I've been there. I know very well what it's like to be screwed by a large company because they doubt you'll have the reach to spread the word.
> Also, oftentimes pressure from an individual case can lead to fixes to an automated system
That seems very inaccurate, sadly. Most of these systems have closed loops where our ramblings are never integrated into the loop. My impression is that usually at best someone goes into said systems and marks it as "manual" to take it out of the system then resolves it. I imagine there are many cases where the system continues completely untouched and it's "verdict" is considered by the internal models to still be valid and the company simply cuts a check or whatever is required to brush the problem under the rug.
I don't need to be well connected or have some arbitrary requirement of being "enough" of a community member to get basic recourse in other venues. In most other cases of our lives for these kinds of basic disputes you can rely on a combination of local laws, police and small claims courts.
I agree with most of your other points overall. My complaint isn't to say we shouldn't be raising an issue, it's really more about the way we act like the problem is solved once the giant fire no longer is roaring but there are still embers that eventually reignite.
My comment isn't exclusive to HN - it's a much more widespread issue on many social media platforms.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...