Yeah, they used to not be terrible, when I first started freelancing. Granted, you had to sift through the listing to find jobs worth considering, but it was worth the search for the few gems.

With the changes to their system and the higher fees, though, they’re just not worthwhile any longer. There are much better sources of higher-paying jobs. And a bonus, there tends to be a lot less quibbling over payment when working with higher-quality clients.

It’s basically a database of job offers, similar to Indeed. You can run searches and filter by specific types of jobs and pay rates. Both clients and freelancers are rated and receive reviews. Pretty straightforward setup.

At first, they charged a flat 10% of the agreed-upon price. They have a system by which the client has to have the money in a secured account, basically held by them, until the job is marked completed. There’s a period in which the client can review and refuse or accept the work, after which the money is released to the freelancer.

Then the system changed. They upped the fee to 20% of the first $1000 you make with *each client* – not just the first $1000 you make using their site, but each client- and you also have to buy points to use to bid on jobs. Each job, depending on the budget, costs a certain number of “points” to respond to.

To put a pretty bow on top, they also won’t let you take your contacts off Upwork without paying a pretty exhorbiant fee, or you get kicked off the site. So you can’t contact the client privately and arrange an off-Upwork contract. Presumably this doesn’t apply if the client has other jobs they want to offer you, but I wouldn’t count on that.

I used them when I started freelancing, and met several steady clients through them, but the rising cost and restrictions, coupled with their poor screening of clients just makes this a quicksand trap for new and unskilled freelancers.

One of those user-beware kind of sites.

The guidelines I’d found are admittedly a few years old, so I would definitely ask before putting much effort into writing for them.

Checked out Fast Company because I’d never heard of it, and I found this:
We cannot offer to pay for contributed stories, but if they’re engaging to read and useful to our audience, we will energetically promote them, just like any other story that runs on our site.

I’m not looking for work, but do they really pay $2-$3 per word? I thought I’d bookmark that in case I suddenly found myself bereft of clients–which has never happened in 15 years of self-employment, but there’s always that fear, right?