Yes, Upwork are moving everybody on the 10% fee. But they previously had a progressive fee:
* 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client
* 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned
* 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned
Those figures are per client. Start a new job with someone else, you start from the lower bracket again.
So they were basically living off short term contracts and low paid freelancers. Now it penalises everyone the same, but 10% is much more reasonable than 20%
I've been trying to stay afloat in this terrible hiring market through Upwork, and I'm ambivalent. Without it, I'd pretty much be broke. But even with a profile that has been created in 2012, has $50k billed, I've only been able to find short term consulting or sysadmin jobs paid terribly, and lost 20% off each of them because of the prohibitive lower bracket.
IMHO, most of the Upwork jobs are upwards of $1000 if it's a serious client.
A large number of freelancers & agencies have built a stable clients on Upwork from years together. It will be a little revenue shock for them. Or eventually clients will pay more to cover the costs.
Let's assume you are a freelancer with a client relationship of 40k
* 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client - $100
Yeah, a lifetime 10% just for making the introduction is pure exploitation. On the buyer side we have been defrauded by Upwork providers and the company did absolutely nothing. Clear cut case of illegal activity and ToS violation, Upwork did nothing other than take our money. The FTC needs to beat this gang of criminals into the ground. They are a racket from top to bottom. Fraud shouldn't pay. Exploitation of workers shouldn't pay. Breaking the law shouldn't pay.
Upwork contractors reside in many different jurisdictions around the world so I won't even trying guessing the legalities. Certainly they are breaking the law somewhere. However, one thing is certain: there is a very strong incentive to not look for long term contracts on Upwork.
That incentive always was there, but it was small. It isn't small any longer. The trajectory makes one wonder what this fee will be in another year or two. Clearly they won't be lowering it.
Upwork is not an independently sustainable company. Upwork shares are worth less than at their 2018 IPO. They've never really been profitable. They rarely have a positive free cash flow. They've increased outstanding share count 26%. The things they've done only reduced the value customers receive from them (like when they decided to charge extra money to view contractor reports.)
How did they never make any money? Companies spend billions of dollars a year on recruiting. This isn't a tiny market. Someone grossly mismanaged Upwork -- for their customers, for their contractors, and their shareholders.
Has anyone paid this fee? I think when it gets to the point of dropping 12% of a freelancer's annual income to just talk outside of the platform it's simply not worth it.
If you wait two years per grandparent's post, the fee is only $1, which probably is worth it.
If you want to convert sooner, it's a percentage of the income for that specific client/freelancer relationship, and not total work for the freelancer. So it is probably a more palatable amount, assuming the freelancer has multiple clients.
Yeah but the fee is calculated as a percentage of a full time (2080 hour) year. So it's only worthwhile if you're being hired fulltime, near full time, or at a much higher rate than your existing upwork rate.
Have you filed your concerns with the FTC? Have you contacted your congress person?
These seem like real concerns and failures of the market. I know Upwork has strong network effects, so this seems like a justified government intervention
I've hired people with Upwork a few times and I just hire them for a single job and if I'm happy with it. I move to whatsapp and pay via revolut. Everyone seems happy besides upwork to me. lol
I don't know, it seems like an impossible market for an honest middle man to me. 10% of short term contracting being a total bust where a worker should none-the-less be paid seems like a cost companies had that dealt with the lowest of job agencies. If those job agencies could afford to reimburse its because they were taking 50%.
I guess the problem is that I haven't had any luck finding any serious client, due to the competition and race-to-the-bottom.
Some clients want quality, of course, but in this economy if it's a lottery to find a job in the real world, it's a lottery for those billing upwards of $100/h on Upwork.
So what's left is small contracts where being a seasoned expert to deal with emergencies is more important than being cheap.
In general, you're probably an at least somewhat known quantity for clients that aren't especially price-sensitive (so bill in the $100s/hr range) or you're a name in a hat along with a bunch of people who will just take anything they can get. The middle-ground seems like a difficult place to be.
The problem with the new pricing is that matchmaking value drops the longer a contract goes on. Once the relationship and trust is established, they can go around Upwork for 0%.
Yes, milking the lower end is just unfair and will obviously create resentment in freelancers. A really long time back I complained to them that their fees were unfair (I think about the time when eLance and oDesk merged). And their reply was educational to me - "Why are you paying the fees? Bill it to your client or share the cost with them?". And I did start doing that. Few clients were ok with that because the <$500 crowd are the "cost conscious" (to be polite) crowd. The higher brackets were somewhat more easier to convince because they had more to lose and thus felt the indirect payment through UpWork offered them some protection. But yeah, even 10% is still high if they are also charging the other party too.
Not a direct answer but: don't look just for ClickHouse experts. When you hire a plumber, do you only hire experts of that exact brand?
90% of the job I apply for, on Upwork or otherwise, are always looking for an expert in a particular niche technology, and hire only based off that small nugget of information.
I have been doing Elixir full time since 2016, and got a contract with someone that was looking for a Phoenix.Socket expert—a small WebSocket server module part of a larger framework—and the interviewer spent 30 minutes drilling down how much I know that small piece of logic. In this case it's like hiring plumber asking them how much experience they have in square zinc kitchen sinks. Given that I couldn't convey how dumb that is, I had to lie and say that in all of my 7 years with Elixir I have been using Phoenix.Socket pretty much daily. And as expected, it was a bog standard job doing nothing more complicated than an intermediate Phoenix tutorial.
If someone has a lot of experience in databases, and in competitors to ClickHouse they might be good or better than someone that claims to be a world class expert in ClickHouse and nothing else.
(Not to pick on you in particular, but as a true generalist this hiring pattern has been bugging me more and more as my breadth of experience grows.)
When I'm hiring an employee, I'm looking for you! A generalist who will apply their wealth of database experience to my problems and learn what they need for my specifics along the way. I expect to pay some on ramp time where I don't get much in return.
When I'm hiring a contractor, I'm not really interested in paying them to learn, I'm interested in getting my need fulfilled as efficiently as possible. If the problem I have is my square zinc kitchen sink it makes sense to find someone who already knows about them.
In my 11 years of experience as a consultant, people hire me because they need a square zinc sink fixed, but as soon as they see that I know much more than that, they ask me to redo the living room wall and trim the topiary.
Being an expert gets me through the door, being a generalist keeps me around.
The problem is that the square sink expert filter is the biggest obstacle to getting a contract. Reason why with 17 years of total experience, I'm still without a job after 4 months, my longest jobless stint in my entire career (to be fair, I'm pivoting towards starting my own business rather than keep being rejected by clueless recruiters)
This makes total sense to me as both an employer and for hiring contractors.
Sure, if it’s easy to find a square sink expert (it’s usually not), then select for that, generally though, my needs are more varied than that, even if that’s my immediate need and I’d prefer a targeted generalist to be able to solve my immediate problem with a short ramp up time and then hopefully go on to provide value in other areas.
If you need a contractor for 4 hours then sure finding an expert and paying a premium for that match is useful. However, there’s also a huge opportunity cost in looking for someone that‘s an exact match for what you want.
At around 2-3 weeks of work paying a someone that’s very close but not quite what you’re looking for saves your time and means at the end of it you have someone that you can go back to with the exact skill you’re looking for.
It really doesn’t take long before the contractor’s overall competence dwarfs how much specific time they have with some niche thing.
You don't have to pay them to learn. I'm also a generalist freelancer and those general skills make me as productive as most specialists, even accounting for ramp up time. If it does take me more time to learn a new tool, I don't charge for those hours.
This doesn't apply to everything, but Clickhouse is not so different from other analytics tools it requires a specialist.
Not sure if you're still looking, or what your budget is, but back in 2018(ish?) I worked at a semiconductor company that was looking to write their own system for analyzing production test data. We tested a bunch of databases and decided to use Clickhouse. We paid for a support contract from a company called "Altinity". They consulted on the the schema, how we were loading the data, the queries and even fixed some bugs in Clickhouse that we hit.
Looking at their site now, it looks like they've grown a lot and aren't a just boutique Clickhouse consultancy, but offer managed clickhouse cloud instances. There's still a reference to their support contract on the site though, so might still be worth a chat with them.
I have no affiliation with them, just an extremely pleased ex-customer. That was a long time ago though, so I take no responsibility if they've gone to shit now :D.
Why are they still afloat? Last time I checked you couldn't find any work there:
- You could only find jobs if you were ready to underbid everyone else.
- The disproportion between the amount of work and job-seekers was abysmal.
- The platform did nothing to protect the workers from untruthful or exploitative clients (from anecdotal evidence).
- Upwork attracts clients who can't find contractors any other way, mostly because of unrealistic compensation expectation, unreasonable requirements, or poor reputation. This leads to the average job being an underwhelming experience (to put it in generous terms).
Moreover, being on Upwork is a sign of desperation. You fear the day any of your regular clients notices and asks why are you there or just starts to doubt you.
The proposition of the service is very attractive, but I'm not sure if it brings more value than harm in practice. It's very hard to find clients nowadays, but I'm still fighting the urge to restore my account there.
> Upwork attracts clients who can't find contractors any other way
What is the best 'other way', though? Situation: Technical guy at a small company or nonprofit who needs _X_ more complicated technical task done. The choice is either to learn some new skill (lots of time) or find an expert. What other expert marketplaces are there that offer a substantially better environment or experience for all parties?
Ask around. I'm sure there are some technical people in your extended circle that you may not have considered. Also, there are tons of tech job boards out there. Many many years ago, I was a contractor on upwork, but my last foray with them was as a client.
For the tasks I needed done, it worked well enough (translation mostly). However, I wouldn't dare to hire an engineer from the platform. Not because of skills, but because of what it has done to the market. Also, it's a race to the bottom.
It is like it's own career. You start off being underpaid to get a reputation, and work your way up.
Weird story: I started my career on odesk (before it was called upwork) and finished 50 or so contracts before I moved 3.5k miles to my first bay area job.
Which was across the street from the odesk office.
They don't protect employers either. We had a guy whos contract was still open and he booked 80hrs and scammed us and then closed his account. Couldn't get the money back from upwork
I have been using Upwork for years to outsource tasks. I'm still not sure what to think of them.
On the one hand, I keep coming back because I usually find the better freelancers on Upwork than elsewhere.
On the other hand, paying them 10% means a freelancer who works for me for two weeks works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee. And there are other fees on top of that. Upwork's overall take rate is over 15%.
And what is super annoying: For every freelancer you work with, they send you 12 (!) PDFs per month. For each week, they send you: a) The invoice of the freelancer b) An invoice of Upwork 3) A receipt for your payment.
Even if you worked with a freelancer for years, there is no way to switch to monthly invoicing.
In the UK, if you work through a recruitment agent then they will be taking 10-20% of your rate as a margin.
If you work through a consultancy that could be as high 30-50%.
If you do your own business development then that is hard work, risky and also expensive. It would take much more than 10% of your time.
Though freelancing can be a tough gig, I don’t think Upworks rates are unreasonable considering they have a marketplace of work requiring very minimal biz dev and various financial protections to make sure you get paid.
All of these rates just gets loaded into the rates the clients pay anyway so it’s a wash to a certain extent.
> In the UK, if you work through a recruitment agent then they will be taking 10-20% of your rate as a margin.
I would still expect a pure software marketplace to be significantly cheaper than a recruitment agency, given economies of scale and other efficiency gains.
A recruitment agent or a consultancy will often give you a personalised one-to-one service, and hence the higher fees can be somewhat justified. Upwork largely provides an automated service. So let's be realistic and not compare the two.
My experiences have been similar. Very happy with the talent and confident that I could get good people there at any time. At the same time, I'm quite ambivalent about their UX (the invoice issue you mention is really bad) and the fees. I feel it's prime for disruption.
The platform has a lot of features, including complex ones in the area of payments. But I think a challenger should be able to build something with fewer resources and take, say, ~7% instead of 15%. Being an old incumbent, Upwork probably carry a lot of cruft around.
Of course building a marketplace is very hard (dual marketing problem, etc.) but I don't think it'd be that hard to build a new one. As a buyer at least I'm not that locked in, I have also tried other platforms (ex: a European one called Malt) with great success, and I often shop around between platforms if I can.
I think what hurts here are how the fees are structured. If I charge client $100, the invoice will show this number. This will also be the income I’ll be reporting to tax authorities, so I have to pay income tax on $100, and an Upwork fee will be automatically deducted. I don’t know if they would have a legal way to do this but I would much rather my invoice showed $90 in this case since I never even had the chance to see the full $100.
In some countries not necessarily. I’m based in Czech Republic and as a sole proprietor the most preferential way to do taxes (up to certain threshold) is to report the gross income and use a tax rule that assumes that it cost you 60% of gross revenue to get your income. In this case the lower income shown the better.
So you've spent 10% and are 50% up. Isn't that already advantageous enough for you?
Taxes fund a civilised and (mostly) well run society that you benefit from. Misreporting your gross income shifts more of that burden onto your friends and neighbours!
The Upwork fee is reported as a business deduction on your tax return. As an independent contractor you pay income taxes based on your self-employment net income (not your gross income, as employees are) because you are effectively treated as a type of business for income tax purposes.
it's really depends on the country laws and legal entity type, in some cases you must report gross income and all platforms fees can't be considered as expenses.
San Francisco has a gross revenue tax that is significant for tech companies.
Hawaii also has a general excise tax based on gross retail and/or service revenues and is the state's primary tax on businesses (in lieu of income taxes).
Ohio's commercial activity tax is based on gross revenue above a threshold.
Oregon's corporate activity tax is based on gross revenue above a threshold.
Washington's B&O tax is based on gross revenue and is the state's primary tax on businesses (in lieu of income taxes).
France's social contribution tax is based on gross revenues above a threshold.
And those are just the ones I know off the top of my head because I deal with them regularly.
I realize this doesn't apply to Upwork, but don't the new U.S. tax laws discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614313 prevent companies from writing off development costs, meaning they are taxed on the gross revenues (at least for that year)
No, they have to capitalize (or amortize) development expenses over a 5 (domestic R&D) or 15 year (foreign R&D) period instead of getting to deduct them currently (meaning in the year incurred).
Due to the way depreciation works, development is treated as incurred mid-year regardless of when in the taxpayer's tax year they are actually incurred, so the ultimate effect is that only 10% of the development costs can be deducted in the first year, 20% for the next 4 years, and 10% in the final year (6th calendar year after incurring cost, due to the deemed mid-year start in the first year).
Washington State has a B&O tax which, until recently, was the primary state tax. Hawaii has a ~4% gross receipts tax but it can be visibly passed on to customers like a sales tax.
They seem to try harder than most not to kick anyone off. That was demonstrated in that they waited until the last possible moment to stop operating in Russia. Also their press release reads like this:
> Our hearts and support go out to all those affected by this senseless war against Ukraine. We hope that a path to peace is ahead for Ukraine, and that we are able to bring our mission back to Russia and Belarus in the future.
That's quite hopeful considering where things are right now.
I would put them in a small set of bold companies processing lots of difficult payments including Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, and Coinbase.
Which raises the freelancers bid, which decreases their competitiveness, which decreases the chance of winning the job/contract, which decreases overall pay. That's what one of the other commenters meant when they said they have to pay it one way or another.
The only way the fee "magicly" disappears is if someone in the pipeline doesn't care about the increased cost and eats it. At which point, the freelancer is underbidding for the job anyways.
The real point is having effectively having high % fee discourages/suppresses the volume of transactions. Because freelancers are pretty heavily locked into the platform by design and the companies that hire are not, the freelancers get hit with the burden of the suppressing fees to a much higher degree (they have to compete with bids from other platforms/consultants that don't have large fees)
When I started out as a freelancer / independent contractor, I made the conscious decision to not use any of these platforms, out of fear for my client base or finances being tied up and taken away from me due to a simple ToS violation; the fees never sat with me either. Admittedly, it took so much longer to get a consistent base of clients (1-2 years), but it feels like a fresh of breath air over having to rely on another platform to do right by me. Now I am at 0% fees, NET-14 and get paid directly without a hold.
Don’t worry, on Upwork you can blatantly violate the TOS and even if the client complains the platform will not take away the payments. Or maybe they will, but they most definitely will not refund them to the client. Speaking from experience (as the client).
For clarification, “NET -NN” and “NET NN” are common shorthand for describing cash flow, where the minus signifies that the customer pays before receiving the product or service, and a positive number signifies that they receive the product or service before paying.
Freelancers are typically paid after providing a service.
I've had a good experience with Upwork as a buyer of Development, DevOps and Design Services. There are a lot of unreliable providers there, but also some really talented, dedicated and professionals too who seem to make a good living if they live in slightly lower cost regions.
We had a fairly complex client project, and it worked really well for bringing in fractional skills. 20 hours of a Spark expert, 60 hours of an Azure expert, 5 hours of someone to help install a certain tool etc. Better than hiring a generalist for a longer period.
I imagine it is challenging as a freelancer, but it's a decent platform from the other side and adds value.
Sites like upwork, freelancer, fiver, etc are the worst places to find contract jobs. Its a mix of very desperate people and scammers, the quality is very low, and the rates are low - attracting the worst possible buyers. No one will see your posts unless you spend money, and it costs a lot. So you are better off spending your money and time on advertising your services and do networking activities in your local area. Use your social network to find referrers. Or work for people that are good at finding jobs
They must already be making a killing as they don’t do much; I mean their platform is so depressingly badly written, I don’t quite understand how you can get it to that state. They want (it’s in the rules) you to stay in their chat and communication system, but it is basically unusable for anything serious, so no one does. There is the impossible invoicing more people here mentioned; my accountant keeps asking if they cannot just send 1 invoice once per month that it is clear instead of the vague warble they send once a week.
Their ‘recruiters’ are just friendly community chatters who talk a lot to people with that automatically (you get them too in the recommended list) match the skills (in their profile; there is of course no way to tell if they actually do match the skills you need; I needed an AD expert for 1 year and the recruiter introduced me to the perfect person; in a chat they admitted to me that they had worked with it once a long time ago…).
This is ready for disruption. But not by something like Toptal. Which should be mentioned, if you want to talk about greed…
They are losing money and have always been. They are spending a ridiculous amount of money to bring in clients through ads and other marketing channels, and the whole thing simply doesn't look too sustainable.
Ah, I did not know that. It looks like a goldmine considering the amounts that streams in. But yeah, if they spend a lot on acquisition; that goes very fast.
This seems to be happening due to the nature of the freelance work itself. It simply can't work at scale in a win-win fashion: if you want to attract immense volume of clients the way Upwork does, you are inevitably looking for those who don't know what they are doing, and are lured by advertisement. And that's pricey. I've been there for 15 years and made millions; i believe whole freelancing thing exists simply due to the systematic fallacy.
This is in addition to the % fees they also charge the buyer.
As a very long time user of Upwork since before the days of oDesk and Elance, don't understand the greed here. They used to at least offer discounts on the rate when you had over $10K billings with a client.
This just increases prices across the board as contractors will raise their rates to account for the fees.
Silly as it gives their users motivation to give competitors a look, as well as a competitor to rise that doesn't want to be as greedy with the now common Airbnb style of charging all sides fees.
Surely they got jealous of all the 20-30% fees relatively new services like Uber, GrubHub, Fulfilled by Amazon charges and figure they should get in the game as compared to their legacy thinking...
Wish they'd provide additional value and services for additional revenue, rather than continue to squeeze both sides of the transaction.
I lost believe to work via upwork to be honest. I have the profile 10 yo. and after the changes with connects to use to send for the dead job posts as result it's really unfair. then they added more commissions and the rules are always changing.
I feel like now it's better to search the job in LinkedIn via the connections and the jobs posts with Fast Apply option. I don't promote LinkedIn but it's more attractive for me for now.
Also what you get by paying the huge commission and timer that screens you? they don't help you promote, autocomplete cover letters, what the real advantage in this case.
They do help with promotion by giving "top rated" and "raising talent" badges and work history. Hard to say how much value and leverage it really gives and whether it worths all the downsides.
work history is github or linkedin or gitlab to show your the real examples. But the ideas around connects, fees, it's really unsuitable to deal with the platform. Even the job post could be dead because the author left the platform and found the freelancer in the other place. and as result the connect points could not be restored. at least I had such experience by buying connects to apply and then I skipped this idea and didn't come back.
Upwork is the prototypical clown car that crashed into a gold-mine. (Or is it?)
Well it's definitely a clown car. The product experience is comically bad (like sad clown comedy). There is incredible friction in the hiring and interviewing processes. API access is disabled unless you have a through-the-nose enterprise account.
I would die for a freelancer hiring platform that I could interact with programatically, so I wouldn't have to use their shitty tools.
(Source: Hired through rentacoder, vworker, upwork, elance, etc.)
Coincidentally, I just became Top Rated Plus (as opposed to normal Top Rated) on Upwork thanks to finishing my first large contract! I'm going to have a mini-party with my wife to celebrate, haha. Upwork dramatically changed my life. I don't care much either way about the fee change, but I get why other people do.
Wow 600 million. I don’t understand where that money goes. Aren’t they just a website that connects clients with developers? Maybe they spend a lot on advertising or business development
For reference: I was unfortunate enough to be a tech lead after a company got bought out by private equity. Their edict was “they don’t want to be a tech company”. I was forced to hire contractors through an agency.
They charged us at least 20% more than the contractor.
I also work in cloud consulting at $BigTech. I know exactly how much money I bring into the company at I know how much my bill rate is. The company takes much more than a 10% cut.
On a broader note: it’s easy to find out how much revenue BigTech brings in per employee and compare it to your compensation.
Wow, I thought they would honor the 5% charge till the end of the contracts but it seems they will go to 10% by the end of the year.
Since Upwork theoretically locks you in for 2 years with a client, I’m expecting there will be a small exodus of people with long-term projects . I’d much rather sort out invoicing myself and get paid through Stripe than lose out on extra 5%.
People who actually rely on Upwork care about fresh reputation and active status. Platform makes it appealing to stay active. They have a decent reputation with customers, so it's a backup for when you fire your current client. But if you are inactive they stop recommending you and after a while you are delisted making it tougher to get clients. And customers like to see people who are active.
Also, automatic billing is a big value add for those of us who hate paperwork and chasing non paying customers. Upwork does it for you.
Re crypto, it's an appealing vehicle for laundering and we don't want to be implicated. couple of clients suggested it and it's a red flag for me. (if you want to get paid in crypto I don't get why you would use Upwork at all honestly, surely you have your own great platforms with how much talent is supposedly working on that web3 stuff)
The advantage of staying on the platform for freelancers is that they are guaranteed to get paid for correctly booked work on a predictable timeline.
For buyers, the advantage is one weekly payment to your credit card, some contractural protection and a bunch of features to support the work.
I’ve never felt the need to bypass them as a buyer, and I’ve only been approach a few times by freelancers to go direct. (My answer has been no mainly because I dislike the admin of manually paying people, checking timesheets, invoices etc.)
This is against the terms and conditions I believe and in theory Upwork can charge you or the client some extra fee if you take the project outside of the platform.
I didn’t check the ToC in a while but last time I did if you got a client through Upwork you cannot work with them outside of their platform for two years otherwise you and the client risk a fine.
The worst that can happen is that they can deplatform you as far as I can tell from the ToCs so I bet some people will do just that if their fees go up at the end of the year.
How's Upwork nowadays? I tried getting some gigs there for 3+ years and got nothing. I had more success with r/forhire and Craigslist and the good thing is there's no middleman. Heck, I even spent for Freelancer Plus and I just lost my connects to people who didn't even consider to read my proposal and check my profile
I used it many years ago and it was decent, but not good. Tried again recently and it’s way worse than I remember.
Pretty much every client expects you to enter a bidding war starting at $100 (and going down, obv) to build them a multiplatform app with backend and a mountain of features.
What I don’t understand is who accepts these jobs? Scammers? I can’t imagine that Upwork has many happy clients.
$100 in US is INR8000 in India, if the job timeline is one week, and they took up 4 jobs in a month that is 32,000. Which is more than the entry level software job salary.
Upwork is a global company, not just the US market, so thinking in local currency won't make sense.
I was on Fiverr 7 years ago I explored it a lot, during my course of finding work there I came across interesting things. There were dedicated shops that took up 10-15 projects a week in the same bracket as u mention, the owner of one such shop bought a Harley Davidson in a year(Harley Davidson bikes cost a lot in India) his shop was 4 fresh out graduates who exclusively built WordPress websites. And there are many such groups.
Also funny enough most of the logo/graphic design/video edit jobs a remixes of PSDs/templates found on envato, freelogogenerator etc. You rarely find quality in such sites, you get what you pay for.
Yes, Upwork are moving everybody on the 10% fee. But they previously had a progressive fee:
* 20% fee for the first $500 earned from a client
* 10% fee between $500 and $10,000 earned
* 5% fee after the first $10,000 earned
Those figures are per client. Start a new job with someone else, you start from the lower bracket again.
So they were basically living off short term contracts and low paid freelancers. Now it penalises everyone the same, but 10% is much more reasonable than 20%
I've been trying to stay afloat in this terrible hiring market through Upwork, and I'm ambivalent. Without it, I'd pretty much be broke. But even with a profile that has been created in 2012, has $50k billed, I've only been able to find short term consulting or sysadmin jobs paid terribly, and lost 20% off each of them because of the prohibitive lower bracket.