> works one whole day just to pay the Upwork fee
If they have any sense they pass the cost of the fee on to you in their hourly rate or project cost or whatever.
If they have any sense they pass the cost of the fee on to you in their hourly rate or project cost or whatever.
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)