Upwork just stole $10k from me

To mention, none of these are like Upwork. I've tried them all, and they don't really have competition that makes it as easy as Upwork to find and hire someone.

Freelancer.com is the nearest. The rest are doing very diff models. TopTal doesn't even belong on a comparison list.

For the uninitiated, mind explaining why TopTal (and the rest) don't look at all the same?

You go through an addmission process that's pretty much similar to an employement process (several interviews, technical interviews, tests etc).

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).

Wow, they banned you for that? Curious to hear the full story!

Why applying when you already knew what they would be paying ?

The short version: I was working on and off on upwork for the past... 10 years or so (since they were called elance). Didn't had too many projects (less than 20) and only applying there only for very small gigs, when I had some breaks from my regular clients (a couple of times per year).

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 :)

Lol, I was applying asking for my regular rate.

That's the whole story. They'll send a message saying "looks like this isn't working out for you".

Crazy, thanks for sharing! What a weird approach on their part, i wonder if they were having problems with multiple bids from fake names or something.