I’d like to start by saying I find it completely normal freelancing platforms charge you as they do for the service of finding clients for freelancers.

Freelancer Protocol is for people who haven’t met on a platform and need a framework to engage in a standard deal. Deal finalisation (deliverable against money) is conditioned to the client accepting a demo (link or video) of the working code. The framework has basic features, like paperwork generation (invoice & contract) and communication (chat and file share).

I just integrate with Stripe for payment & invoice. After checking out a couple of APIs, decided to go with https://esignatures.io/ for online contracts/signatures. They charge per contract and have the features I need (Templates mgmt + Zapier integration).

Please let me know if you know a better way for me to integrate chat (right now I use the firebase db and messages load with a little lag, it’s not a meant for this use case). Feel free to reach out to hello@freelancerprotocol.com or in the comments.