Freelancer.com Sucks, Do Not Use Their Service!

In this review we shall explore freelancer.com. The idea behind this website is very clever. It could have become a very valuable service to society; however due to the sheer greediness of its owners, the company has become a nightmare, and a source of grievance to many people. 

As you probably already know, freelancer.com is a website that lets employers and employees meet each other in order to realize a project. Basically, a platform that allows people to meet in order to give work or get work.

A couple of days ago business insider published an article mentioning the fact that freelancer.com had purchased escrow.com for $US 7.5 million. Also, it was mentioned that over past year freelancer was essentially in a buying spree, in order to "build out" its community. In other words, they are buying out the competition in an attempt to consolidate a substantial share of the freelancing market online. This is fine for me, provided they supply a valuable service for its users, which they don't. 

The first fatal flaw of freelancer.com is its system of charging a percentage fee for each project completed, as well as, all the other fees, deposits, and subscriptions that go along with making an account. Though, they do give you a free trial, it is hardly any help for people seeking employment or looking for employees. First of all, freelancer.com could obtain their revenue through different sources, while providing a platform free of charge. One way I could think of is through advertisement. However, I am not here to give them any ideas, I am here to simply point out the immorality of people taking advantage of others whom are seeking work.  

Let us look at some of the evidence; this review can be found as the top hit when searching for the words "freelancer.com review". This testimony came from 'omnipresentwords.wordpress.com'; "I have been a member of this site since November 2012 and I have earned good reviews on this site. This growing reputation and stellar reviews helped me in landing two high value projects, one for $ 5000 (Translation of 250 pages from Spanish to English) and another for $ 7500 (Sending out business emails to Top Executives for a Business Consultancy Firm), with my account balance by Christmas 2012 having a net balance of $ 1500. After the initial bid and customized samples being provided as per their requests, both the projects were awarded to me and a 100 % milestone payment was created for each. Yes, it was a happy Christmas and the new year looked promising with both the projects scheduled to end on January 22nd and 25th 2013 respectively. The acceptance of the projects had already caused a debit of $ 1250 as commission charged by Freelancer.com, even before the milestones had been released.". 

The testimony continues as the victim explains: "Within a short time, I received a mail from the freelancer.com staff that my account had been limited due to security reasons, pending which I would be unable to withdraw or transfer funds from my account. I was asked to provide a Government Issued Identity document, a residential proof as well as a recent photograph of mine which was supposed to be taken in a manner similar to convicts in my country and answer some questions to elaborate more on the project which I had done. My $ 14000 were at stake, I had no option but to comply. I complied. Not once but three times and every time I got the standard request to resubmit scans of a different id every time with each mail ending with a ‘We look forward to your cooperation and understanding’. And today when I logged in to my account on the site, I saw to my horror that my account balance has been reduced to $ 99 with both of the previous two projects declared invalid and the accounts of both those employers blocked. Neither of the employers, on being contacted via email, have had their money refunded by the site, which means that the money is still with the site."

A different review came from an employer; this review can be found in 'http://sandipsekhon.com'. "The reason why Freelancer has been able to acquire many competitors is because of their profitability. And that profit comes from fleecing their users as hard as possible. The moment you register on the site they try to make you pay for everything and anything. From paying so that your project is available straight away without a review (even though they go live in a few minutes anyway) to prompting you every at every step to become a paying member to get crappy ‘perks’. At the moment, they’re even trying to flog Freelancer baseball caps.

The review continues "And their crafty fees don’t stop there. While going through old emails on one of my gmail accounts, I realized that I had a Freelancer account under a different username too – it was my vWorker account that had been transferred over. Out of curiosity, I logged into it and was pleasantly surprised to see a positive balance of around $130 on the account. That was from funds that I had in vWorker before they were acquired and had forgotten about. After looking into it in more depth, I was stunned to see that this amount originally sat at over $200. Freelancer had quietly been taking $10 a month as an ‘inactivity fee’. I had never received any notification of this. A quick email saying: “Hey Sandip, check your account or we’re gonna start taking a fee” would have sufficed. But of course, in true Freelancer.com style it’s all about making money wherever you can." 

Freelancer.com abysmal disregard for customer care and complete negligence to support employers really makes this website truly despicable, as it only seems to care to make money, and not provide a valuable service to its users. This is why I highly recommend people to stay away from freelancer.com and to look for alternatives, as I am sure they are out there. Furthermore, this a trend a see a lot in the internet; thus it is imperative for us as a community to take action, and actively boycott these immoral people, so that they may never profit from the desperation of those seeking employment or looking for employees.