Pros and Cons of Freelancer.com
What is Freelancer.com? Freelancer is a crowdsourcing marketplace website which allows employers to post their project and hire a freelancer to complete it. The website offers a wide range of potential work opportunities, such as copywriting projects, translation, web development, web design and much more. Luckily, I worked on Freelancer.com for a while and experienced both its advantages and disadvantages myself. I decided to write this article and share my opinion about Freelancer.com because I believe that before beginning to work as freelancers, people need to be aware of the peculiarities of the freelance platforms they decided to work on. I’ll state my honest opinion and refer to real situations that occurred while I worked on it. Now, what does make Freelancer so popular, what are its pros and cons? Let’s find out.
What is Freelancer.com? Freelancer is a crowdsourcing marketplace website which allows employers to post their project and hire a freelancer to complete it. The website offers a wide range of potential work opportunities, such as copywriting projects, translation, web development, web design and much more. Luckily, I worked on Freelancer.com for a while and experienced both its advantages and disadvantages myself. I decided to write this article and share my opinion about Freelancer.com because I believe that before beginning to work as freelancers, people need to be aware of the peculiarities of the freelance platforms they decided to work on. I’ll state my honest opinion and refer to real situations that occurred while I worked on it. Now, what does make Freelancer so popular, what are its pros and cons? Let’s find out.
The Edge
Being one of the best freelance marketplaces Freelancer.com has a countless amount of job offers. Among them are website design, IT development, article writing, and more. The versatility and countless amounts of projects for freelance services are certainly a great advantage. Moreover, Freelancer.com works in real time, which is just fascinating for such broad freelance platform. The messages in employer- freelancer chat is instant, which is truly convenient. But obviously, there are certain peculiarities.
When you register, it’s understandable that you won’t be accepted to a complex high budget project, due to lack of experience and feedback on your profile. But here Freelancer.com has a particular feature different from other platforms. For example, you have a high amount of five-star feedbacks which account for web design projects, or other freelance services that you have completed. Now you have decided to complete a graphical design project, and you have no feedback in this field at all. The thing is that the position of your bid will depend on your feedback. So from the situation described above, your bid will be on the top list in web design, and at the very bottom in graphical design projects. Such arrangement is only typical for freelancer.com because on other platforms your position in the list depends on the when you posted your bid, not on your feedback. Advantage or not, it’s up for you to decide.
Considering the prices, let us begin with the bidding payment. The subscription is, in fact, cheap in comparison with Upwork and other freelance platforms, only 10$ for 100 bids, that is definitely an advantage. Concerning the prices of the employers, to be honest sometimes they are quite appealing and fare, which is indeed great, but sometimes they are just hilarious. It surprises me how people are a 100% sure that you will want to complete a week project for the price of one day project, or write a 2000 word article for 5$. One thing needs to be taken into account, that you do not have a good relationship with your employer, do not agree on payments outside freelancer.com, they just won’t pay you and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Also, never begin working on the project; if there’s no milestone request from the employer, the result is basically the same.
Even if you ran out of options and continuously browsed the system in search of a suitable job offer, a number of projects are constantly refreshed. On the left bottom corner, you’ll see frequently appearing brief descriptions of the newest job offers. It may seem good, but I would say that such feature is somewhat bittersweet. The disadvantages are that those offers are not sorted in the area of your expertise; it’s basically every new project which was just posted by the employer. The constant popping out offers result in the accident openings of the unwanted offers and decrease the concentration while working, which is obviously very irritating and uncomfortable.
Tech support is crucial for any freelance platform. Personally, for me, I accidently selected the wrong service package and paid more. When I contacted the tech support, they instantly returned the money and changed the package. They have helped me and my team on numerous issues as well, so I could describe them like truly helpful. Moreover, the tech support is generally conveniently organized, there’s no chat with the service right away, you have to browse your problem through the search engine, and then contact the support via chat. Here is the direct support link just in case you’ll need it : https://www.freelancer.com/support/search?keyword=help
Flip side of the coin
It’s obvious that perfection simply does not exist, and of course, this also accounts to Freelancer. The first disadvantage of this marketplace is that withdrawing money takes a great while. It takes 14 days to receive your currency after the withdrawal request. You should keep in mind that extracting your funds from Freelancer.com is indeed a very time-consuming procedure. In comparison, in a number of countries such as USA, New Zealand or Poland you make extract the funds directly into your bank account and the procedure only lasts for 3 days.
Another feature to be considered is the project fee. The amount varies from the project’s budget, usually from 10 to 20%, but that is not the main point. The point is that the fee will be pulled off from your online funds instantly. It’s not that pleasant to see the negative balance of your funds. Plus, you might need the remaining amount to purchase more bids, for example, but it’s impossible because of the instant fee pull off.
Drawing a conclusion
Overall, there’s nothing perfect and this statement accounts to Freelancer.com as well. Although the low cost of bids, real-time chat with the employees and responsive tech support, there are also a great number of disadvantages. That this is common for every online marketplace. Freelancer.com is possibly the best existing platform for short-term projects due to the vast amount and versatility of job offers and acceptable fee, in comparison with other platforms. I believe that once you get the taste of working on Freelancer.com you’ll find the process comfortable and satisfying. You’ll just need to get used to a number of its peculiarities which are not that convenient. I hope that my article was helpful for you, and either you have decided to work on Freelancer.com or not, I wish you the best of luck.