Is Upwork a toxic place for freelancers?
It seems that they now charge freelancers to submit bids to projects. I get why. As someone who has occasionally tried to hire developers and artists on Upwork, you used to get so much spam from unqualified applicants that it was hard to find the decent applications.
But it still becomes a race-to-the-bottom in price on Upwork. They require that you “bid” for the project, either with an hourly rate (and any decent developer should make more per hour than the average Upwork developer will bid) or with a fixed bid. And yet a reasonable fixed bid is impossible to prepare with the limited information the client typically provides.
So Upwork is primarily a place for people who have a hard time getting longer gigs to get low-paying, low-skill work.
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I’ve seen what appear to be a few exceptions with really high hourly rates. So it may not be entirely toxic. But if you have the skills to command $80/hour or more, it’s hard to get in to the Upwork ecosystem without doing some “nearly free” work at $20/hour or less, since clients will judge you based on how much work you’ve done and what your reviews say. (Edit to add: If the hourly rates in your industry are lower, then please translate the rates appropriately. If you normally make $20/hour, I guarantee there will be someone on Upwork who will do the same work for $5/hour.)
Worse, your reviews are really your livelihood on Upwork, so if you end up with a toxic client who effectively asks you to do a ton of work for free (if, say, you made a fixed bid project), you’re stuck doing that extra work for fear of getting a bad review. Because one bad review can make it harder to get any new jobs on Upwork.
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