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Freelancer.com CEO here.

I think your anger is a bit misplaced given that from reading of your case it appears that all the trouble you've had is a bit self inflicted.

Your complaint, if I can understand correctly, is that you've hired a developer to build a website, for which you've paid 75% already - and run into trouble on the last 25%, for which the developer has returned your money.

First of all - we make this abundantly clear on the site - you should never, ever pay funds unless the deliverables are complete and you are 100% happy. This is the real world, and just like eBay there are good, average and not so good people participating in the marketplace. Luckily, we provide protective mechanisms like our Milestone Payment system which works a bit like escrow. If you use it properly you will always get all your money back if something goes wrong. If, however, you make payments in advance of finished product then you are really assuming the risk here.

Secondly - NovaStudios has 406 feedbacks, and from their profile it looks like they have a degree from Harvard and come from Cleveland, Ohio. Having run Freelancer for 4 years I can say for certain that you don't get that far on the site being a bad developer and if I could hazard a guess I would say the relationship broke down more than anything.

Thirdly - you are wrong about your 2nd lesson. The system is not prone to abuse if you follow the guidelines. You are also free at any time to file an "incomplete" report which is an extremely negative review if you think it is justified.

Finally, I may add, the first I heard of this issue was an abusive email from you at 6am this morning. It's 7am now. Given you had my personal email address I would have been more than happy to look into this but instead you went off and posted this here without giving me a chance to look at your case. If you expect customer service, at least give someone the chance to deliver it.

Regards Matt

Matt,

I've been dealing with your customer service since January 17th (see a pdf mentioned in the post or check ticket #SED-989-67810 in your support).

Your system is indeed prone to abuse. All I wanted is to file a feedback. And after paying >$1000, not getting anything back, my project was closed by a developer, and I can't even leave a feedback! So, what kind of protections do I get?

Since you want to resolve this in public this is the reply I just sent to your email:

Michael

1) You should not have released the funds at all until the entire website was delivered 2) The freelancer has 406 feedbacks, someone with that many feedbacks can't get there without delivering really good work so I would like to talk to them about what has gone wrong 3) You can always log an incomplete report which is very damaging to their reputation 4) I have refunded all your fees ($29) 5) You still have $100 in an outgoing milestone payment you can log a dispute for

Regards Matt

Matt,

This isn't about the developer. It is about Freelancer.com. How is it possible that project that I initiated and paid for, gets cancelled by the developer, and I can't even leave a feedback?

From the support chain the OP has posted, it seems your third point is incorrect (or your support staff are incorrect) as they explicitly tell the OP:

  The option to leave an Incomplete report for your freelancer
  has already expired.

Thank you for recognizing the issue. All I wanted is to file a feedback. I lost the money, and I never asked for it to be returned. I took responsibility because it was my stupid mistake to release it. But after paying >$1000, not getting anything back, after my project was closed by a developer, I can't even leave a feedback? So, what kind of protections do I get?

Matt, your cutomer support team is a disgrace. Your bidding API is the least neeeded API in the known universe. Try googling "freelancer scam".

Whether its Freelancer or Odesk, you will almost always get burned a little on your first job. Number one rule is never pay anything up front on a fixed priced job. I do think that Odesk handles feedback in a better way. The buyer should have been able to give negative feedback to the provider.

Meh, Freelancer :(

While this is going to be a rant of sorts in itself, it won't be about this particular case so please be gentle.

So, from what i've gathered from this post is that Freelancer has acquired ScriptLance as well as vWorker/Rent-a-coder, which is what my rant will be about.

I've previously done a few freelancing-gigs here and there on vWorker and due to them recently being acquired by Freelancer i'm more or less forced to do my business there - and seeing another competitor has been bought out by them i'm leaning towards more...

Anyways, as a part of the acquisation, my profile and all my work-history has been transfered to them - or, should have been would be more correct.

What seems to have happened is that i've once in the past on vWorker have renamed my profile so that there where two names associated with the account. This must've completely confused the import system, sometimes displaying my complete work history and ratings, sometime not.

Also, getting the system to even let me login was already quite an undertaking - it won't let you log in with an account name starting with a number (guess what my accountname started with..) and yet, at the very same time, will happily let you password reset your account and will log you in initially after doing the password reset dance - i've gotta admit that had me pretty confused for a while.

So by now i've been able to log in to my account - which is, as of now, still pretty useless as much of the chance to get a freelancing gig depends on your ratings and positive reviews of previous employers (needless to say). The account i now can and could use hasn't had anything attached to it - it was just as empty as a new one, so i figured i'd ping their support staff to ask them about it.

I've contacted them on 3rd January about it and after them giving me the "you sure you typed your password correctly and this is how you reset it" routine i've since tried to explain to them what has happened.

After a few tickets back and forth i've chosen a new name and told them about the old accounts which needed to be merged which was still on the same day (props to them for that).

However, things got quiet quickly and after asking them twice, once on the 5th (still hoping for a quick resolution) and once on the 20th, my accounts still haven't been merged as of today - over a month later!

Their last non-automated response also was on the 20th January and i've since more or less abandoned all hope to get years of work history and positive reviews from happy clients reappear - hopefully this will get someone (mattbarrie?) to look into it :( (Ticket-ID: MCK-898-44151)

If you got that far, thanks for reading and letting me vent my anger a bit.

Lessons:

1. Don't hire people without getting to know them first a bit.

2. Don't hire people who cannot give references.

3. Don't expect cheap jobs to come through. You pay for what you get.

4. Do hire someone from the monthly HN freelancers thread. Lots of reputable people in there.

5. Don't expect a freelancer to also be a security expert. Some just deliver the system, you need to hire security consultants to make it secure.

6. Do subscribe to codejobs. A newsletter I run where people like you can meet and hire reputable people. Its free. http://eepurl.com/uOdzP

7. Rants like these put you in a bad light. Put them on your blog and link here. Posting it directly makes you lose control of the content in case this turns into a PR disaster.

8. Posting the name of the developer is not cool. You are not giving him/her/them a chance to post their side of the story. For all we know you are the scammer.

orangethirty:

Thank you for your first 7 points. However, I cannot agree that posting the name of the developer is "not cool". I attached an entire file of my back and forth to support my case. Furthermore, I am complaining about Freelancer.com, and not the developer.

Giving another perspective, I also agree that this puts you in a bad light. It's unfair, and it shouldn't do, but if you wanted to work with me, and I saw this post, I would most likely decline.

Why? Because it implies there might be drama attached, and no-one wants that in their life, especially when it's such a coders' market right now.

As I say: I recognise that this is unfair. There should be a good way to say "stay away from this person - they wronged me!" somehow. This isn't it, though.

Mudil,

This is not a court. You do not have a need to support your case. By making the name public you are just making yourself look bad. That is why I made point 7. Don't argue. Delete this post while you can. Save yourself the trouble.

I don't agree. Freelancers who work online are used to having their name out there. It's part and parcel of the reputation systems built by Freelancer.com, Guru, and E-lance. Once work is completed, you get a public review.

To me, his main legitimate complaint is that Freelancer.com didn't allow him to leave a review, so he has to turn to taking his story to the wider public.

I don't really agree with his story, but he does have a write to name whom he has worked with in the past.

Sure, though like I said, he is posting his side of the story. This could even be considered as libel by some lawyers. That is why you just don't post stuff like this publicly. The legal risk is too big.

orange how you check if the person is reputable or not?

Speeder, I talk with them through email and Skype. That usually gives me a good feel for the person. But that will not work for everybody. And its not 100% effective, because I have been scammed before (by big name startup founders).

Response from the freelancer:

Matt,

Thank you for alerting us of this situation. We have not been contacted by the client since the dispute was settled some 3 weeks ago, so all of this comes as a complete surprise.

We worked with this client for over 2 months. As is the standard practice, development initially took place on one of our test servers. Once the plugin was complete the client tested and approved the work, then gave us permission to integrate on his site. Integration was met with a number of conflicts due to previous customizations on the client's site. These are outlined in the PM history for the project. We then moved back to our test server to attempt integration (using the client's site backbone). After tireless work weeding through the conflicts we were able to achieve a workable solution. The client then tested and approved the work done, even saying "it's very close". A few days later the dispute was filed and we have not heard from the client since its resolution.

The hacking is an absurd and unfair allegation. The client has posted the same work/project on multiple sites since the dispute resolution, and very well could have done so prior to hiring us. It's very possible that any number of "coders/developers" out there have access to the client's site. A company can't achieve 406 perfect reviews over the course of many years of work without being supremely professional and conscientious.

We hope this gives you a clearer understanding of the background to the situation.

Cheers, Nova Studios

Matt,

He forgot to mention that he crashed our blog for 3 days while working on it, left it dead, and we had to restore it from a week-old database. Then we forced him to move the development to a separate server. Then we didn't trust him. All these details are also in PM.

He also forgot to mention that he has tons of negative reviews, and his score is 4.2 in the last 12 months, hardly a perfect score.

But as I said before, I cannot care about the developer, time lost or even the money. You are the CEO, and you refuse to answer a perfectly legitimate complaint. Freelancer.com does not provide protections to users like me. I was left without the deliverables, without the money, and without an opportunity to leave a feedback. The project that I started and paid for was closed by a person I was confronting! What kind of a fucked up system is that?

Michael

Not to rub salt into your wound, but $1250 for work which you personally acknowledge can take up to 3 months (it took you 3 months to dispute!) is hardly "generous".

What US-based developer can afford to work on your project for this long on that pay?

In short, if you don't want to get screwed, you should: first, start paying competitively. That will help you attract good candidates. Second, spend some time vetting them properly.

I don't think it was 3 months worth of work, just that it took them 3 months to dispute.

I know personally, I had a bad experience with a contractor who delivered work after 8 months, when the timeline called for only 1 week of work.

OK, so why the delay then?

Did you also dispute after 8 months? I would understand if you are willing to cut your contractor maybe a week or two worth of slack. But in OP's case 1-2 weeks difference still doesn't make 1250$ reasonable payment for 2.5 months work.

And if the work was estimated as substantially less, why did OP delay filling the dispute for so long and how is that the web site's fault?

I didn't go through a service---I contracted them directly, so there was no real way to dispute except via small claims court.

Because of that, I ended up contracting someone else for the work who finished it on time. The originally contractor dripped in the work over the course of 8 months with many weeks delay in communication between each dribble of work done. In the end, they completed the job but I had no use for the work at that point, and obviously won't be recommending them to anyone.

I got pulled into a similar situation when I had a how it works video produced on Odesk. Learned real fast that you have to make them meet the milestones in a timely manner and not to pay anything up-front on a fixed price job.

Matt - "First of all - we make this abundantly clear on the site - you should never, ever pay funds unless the deliverables are complete and you are 100% happy."

Judging from that, the decision to pay upfront was your choice. Although what happened really sucks, it does seem like it was self inflicted and in no way freelancer.com's fault.

Also, I do truly feel sorry for you, but making this post on HN is pretty low. If you hired an actual studio than chances are they have a site with contact information. You might have made an attempt at contacting them before this post, I don't know, but if that is the case it doesn't seem like you have given them the chance to respond. If their site doesn't have their contact information you can always run a whois on their domain and possibly get an email address or phone number. I know money issues usually tend to cause a knee jerk reaction but I have learned the best way to deal with problems like this is to, no matter what and before anything else, take time to calm down, relax and clear my head.

Be that as it may, everyone makes mistakes and in this case it seems like both parties did make a mistake. From the sound of it, NovaStudios handled the situation just as bad (arguably worse from a customer service standpoint) as you have. Either way, it's a rough situation. I am WordPress dev and might have some free time in my schedule coming up. If you are in a bind with your site or need some more help let me know and I will see what I can do. Good luck with the situation!

All I wanted is to file a feedback. I lost the money, and I never asked for it to be returned. I took responsibility because it was my stupid mistake to release it. But after paying >$1000, not getting anything back, after my project was closed by a developer, I can't even leave a feedback? So, what kind of protections do I get?

> To make a long story short, all work done by NovaStudios was from overseas.

I'm curious how you know this.

Also, I've read your PDF file and I have to say that it doesn't reflect well on you or your company.

For example, Michael you say:

> HOW CAN THE DEVELOPER ABORT THE PROJECT, IF IT WAS ME WHO STARTED THE PROJECT AND WHO PAID FOR IT?????????

Freelance contracts are always optional for both parties---you can be fired, or you can quit. To complain so strenuously about someone quitting your project shows that you deeply misunderstand the nature of the contractor-contractee relationship.

You repeat this about 3 times in your conversation with freelancer.com support, so its not a one-off misunderstanding.

Also about the milestone system... The milestone system is supposed to protect you by having you only pay once a milestone has been completed. If you pay before the milestone is completed, you defuse the entire process. At that point, its too late to complain that Freelancer.com failed you. Ideally, if someone completes 2 of 3 milestones and then bombs out, you have 2/3rd of the work done and can hand the 1/3rd of the project to someone new.

At this point, I question the accuracy of your narration because you did pay out most of the money to them.

Evil. Letting API bots bid on every project just leads to jobs going to unscrupulous bidders.. avoid freelancer like plague, both as a buyer and a bidder.

Basically you're playing a lottery on any of these sites. You can't trust even dozen of reviews.

I've hired once one of the top 25 devs on Freelancer.com and he went 3x beyond deadline and I wasn't super happy about his solution either. It was just ok. The reason - he was over stretched with many many projects at the same time.

I've had just a slightly better experience on Odesk because you pay hourly and can cut off the freelancer at any time.

My lessons learned:

1.It's hard to find a real top talent on any of these sites even if you're ready to pay the top price.

2. The only way to verify if the freelancer is able to deliver on your project is to give him one two small trial projects.

3. If you're into real important project do your due diligence or better hire HR on the same site who can do this for you professionally.

P.S. yes there are some fantastic freelancers both on Freelancer.com and Odesk if you look harder.

oDesk, Elance and probably many others allow you to actually watch your developer as they work. It isn't for everyone, but it's pretty powerful when you're getting over initial trust issues.

This has the counterproductive side effect of selecting for questionable developers, though, because any developers worth their salt don't need to subject themselves to that kind of creepy degradation to get work. So it creates a problem and then tries to solve it.

Freelancer has exactly the same thing.

Isn't that only if you're doing hourly work?

Correct - but the same applies to the other sites, the time tracker is basically to ensure that hours billed are correct. This doesn't make sense for fixed price projects (as this was)

That's really unfortunate. I just signed up for an account on Freelancer.com so I could get some side work. It sucks having to drop my rates because there are so many out of country individuals and companies that will do the work for pennies on the dollar.

Hopefully if I build up my reputation, ratings, and feedback enough my work will speak for itself.

It sucks having to drop my rates because there are so many out of country individuals and companies that will do the work for pennies on the dollar.

Stop. Right. There.

Take a lesson from somebody who's gone through exactly what you're describing: there are plenty of people outside of whatever country you're based in that are earning more than you would expect. The people who charge pennies, are the ones who don't have the talent to charge more.

Price yourself according to your talents. If you're good, and especially if you can speak "business" (probably the most important skill in going independent, secondary to coding) you don't have anything to fear from the other peoples' lower rates.

I know for a fact that I charge a lot more than plenty of US-based developers, despite being based in Poland. I can do this because I'm really good at what I do.

So can you.

Edit: Personally, if I was starting over again, I'd go with ODesk rather than Freelancer.com, purely because I prefer the way ODesk's website works.

At the same time, I've got a good lot of work via Freelancer, often from pointing out on low-bidding projects when other bidders are talking out of their posteriors - "Please don't go with X or Y, they're talking nonsense and here's why: ..." Maybe unfair, but I do get annoyed when someone suggests developing a crazy NoSQL + custom CMS solution when all the client needs is a WordPress theme...

Freelancer.com: Crazy or Evil?