Hi there,
I am starting with freelance platforms. I use freelancer.com now but I’d like to have advice from those who succeeded there. It is now quite easy to get the first client. I’ve noticed something wrong with the platform, that they limit offers to 15 for the basic membership. How can someone who just start get client with a limit of 15 offers? How can they be motivated to join paid membership in order to get more offers?
Do share your experience, please.
I think you just answered your own question. There is a limit on number offers on the free tiers. That number is set at a level such that it is unlikely you’ll get a successful response from that number of offers. So you need to pay them to raise the limit.
They are fully aware that 15 is too low a number for the vast majority of people to operate for free on their platform, that’s their business model.
Thank you for your time, @DanCouper.
I was astonished to discover that. I understand that they are not there to help you rather help themselves by giving hope that you’ll gain clients. I won’t pay them anything until I get money from their site. I’ll wait for next month.
Something doesn’t sound right… You to pay the platform to access jobs ? I’d be very skeptical of that.
I’d go to indeed dot com and search by job type “contract” and go that route.
It’s been around for a long time. The way it works is like most of these “freelancer marketplaces”: jobs are posted, and freelancers bid for those jobs by writing a proposal. The job poster then picks a bid. It’s just small-scale tendering.
Normally a prospective freelancer needs to make a lot of bids before getting a job, and the platforms use various methods to “encourage” freelancers to pay them to improve chances of getting jobs.
freelancer dot com does this by restricting the amount of bids a user of a free account can make within a given timeframe. It isn’t beyond the bounds of credibility that a user with a free account can consistently get jobs, but it’s unlikely. Upwork from what I remember allows premium users to see jobs earlier than non-premium members, and has a bid limit. Fiverr probably does something similar. And so on.
None of the platforms are really there to get the best deal for freelance workers, they’re just meat markets.
Let’s me try it too.