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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

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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.

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