[Backed Up] Freelancer.com stole from me and ruined my life | Hacker News Reader

[Backed Up] Freelancer.com stole from me and ruined my life

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20 pointsNikxDa8 comments

That's the problem with a platform-as-a-middleman-service that uses a commission business model: they have to aggressively, and I mean aggressively, take measures to ensure neither the providers nor the recipients of the service cut them out of the loop.

I think there is no way around it, good freelancers and good clients will cut the platform leaving there the naive workers and problematic clients.

They survive by making you work for cheap when you enter the platform (kind of unwritten rule to earn "reputation") but once you start commanding better fees they will kick you out under any pretext - they know professionals with good portfolios are going to leave the platform anyway.

Freelance marketplaces are a race to bottom. They have a deleterious effect on your career turning you into a low-fee/shitty-client magnet.

Besides Toptal (which focuses on the 'elite programming' aspect to the detriment of all else), is there a vetted platform for businesses to look for consulting agencies to do projects for them (anything 10K and up), and for independent consultants/consulting agencies to look for work? There are state run vendor boards like https://eva.virginia.gov; but I haven't seen anything comparable in the private sector.

I know our consulting firm has a "director of market development" in part because there is no place we could just hang our sign and get business.

It's mostly networking and word of mouth.

This is the warning I give people: Do not let your livelihood depend on a free service.

It's not even free though.

Nothing's really free. That's true. By "free service", I mean a service where you or other part (or both) don't pay some sort of subscription fee and/or have a contract with the service provider. But I thought I keep it brief for brevity's sake.

But they take a percentage of transaction, and the "freelancers" do pay a monthly fee, I believe... Admittedly I just googled "Freelancers.com business model" and found a Quora answer, so I don't know how accurate it is. But that makes it sound very not-free.

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