Absolutely disgusting behavior by Kevin. I'm kinda hoping that it's just incompetence at UpWork that caused this, and not that Kevin actually knows someone at UpWork, but in all cases that's why I stopped freelancing through UpWork and similar, and started building a solid client base which know that I'm always there to help, for the right price of course. Plus I write somewhat technical and topical blog posts about the technologies I work with (mainly video encoding, processing, P2P CDNs, etc.) and that seems to pull clients in easier than it would be using UpWork.
Building a solid client based has to be the way forward. I was very hesitant to actually make this post, as I don't know how it'll reflect to future employers of any kind.
I think your way of doing things is far better and something I've actually been working.
Absolutely disgusting behavior by Kevin. But thats par for the course - some people are pathetic.
More interesting, is the behaviour of Upwork. With such a clear trail of abusive behaviour from the said "Client", Upwork still decides to terminate the guy's account. If you use Upwork, you are a sharecropper. And the landlords are capricious and have no loyalty to the replaceable tenants.
I mean, it's being handled by 3 different customer support staff, so I don't know what that actually entails.
My advice, get a blog. Write about your experience within industry. My best example would be a man called Simo Ahava, whom writes about GTM and GA. Join Slack groups and communities and just network.
I highly doubt he knows the CEO and even if he did, would said CEO actually act on such an inconsequential thing. I mean, imagine the PR meltdown from such an act.
Anyway, time for some tea and a chillout. Have a good Sunday :)
OK so I have spent the last month trying to make it on Upwork after seeing some of the "$1000 a month income on my side project!" posts here on HN and decided to start doing some side projects while building a rep on Upwork to try to get some outside clients.
I have had absolutely no success with Upwork at all and had been reaching the point of walking away from it and what should I see but this post.
I want, actually desperately need, to be working outside my day job. I'm out of my element. I realized I had to start a blog and have done so and am writing a series of articles relevant to my knowledge and experience.
Aside from that, how might you recommend I make contacts to have long term work with good clients? Your comment is the first I've ever seen about "join Slack groups" - where would I go to get started doing that?
A million thanks if you bother to read this, a million more if you reply :)
Sorry to hear about this Shadi. Kevin is one hell of a asshole. I try to refrain from using profanity but this man utterly deserved it. Will do my best to let every other freelancer know of this and recommend them to stay away as they can from Upwork.
I also tried to refrain, but, as Medium seems to be the only effective medium for myself to vent my frustration, I had to let a couple pop.
Yes, it really is one of those things which you say to yourself 'Oh, it'll never happen to me', then actually it does. I'm the 3rd person I personally know of that's had this happen to them. So I think it's more prolific than it seems.
Looking at some of their responses to reviews on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/wiperecord/reviews/) it would appear the attitude is part of their company culture. Amazing, for a company that bills itself as trying to help people overcome their past, it appears they are simply in the business of taking advantage of a vulnerable group.
True. I was curious and did look at their site and didn't see a Kevin in the attorney list. Not to say he isn't one, just he wasn't listed on the site. I would have ventured to bet he was a rogue IT employee, but with some of the responses to complaints on Facebook, it does somewhat appear that if you question them they get defensive and argumentative.
I run a site that helps ex-offenders find jobs, resources, etc.. and it is always frustrating to see companies that take advantage of a vulnerable group. Not to dismiss the OP and the evidence against them is pretty overwhelming, but there are always two-sides to every story. I have removed the link and references to them and their parent firm as a resource from our site. While we aren't a huge player in the industry, we are growing fast simply because we provide personal help if we can and try to treat everyone fair. I refuse to risk that reputation on a potential bad apple. It's easier just to remove them now, and if down the road this comes out as a simple misunderstanding or whatever, I am happy to add them back. But for now, to me at least, it is better to be safe than sorry and not risk my users paying some greedy company to be treated poorly.
We edited a small bit of identifying info out of this comment. Not that you meant any harm by including it, but we want to strike a balance that protects individuals from mass internet effects while also protecting substantive discussion.
I am a lawyer/coder and "legal tech" is the festering ghetto of my profession. The people who peddle technology solutions to lawyers (or worse, to clients) are usually one step below car salespeople. Try popping your head in to a legal tech conference sometime if you doubt me. It's almost all e-discovery shills talking shite about AI. There are a few exceptions, but not many.
Similar thoughts exactly. This company appears to be a subsidiary of a larger law firm which tells me it was created solely for the purpose of doing "production line" legal services. It is a sales/marketing tool for the one-off that comes along and requires additional legal services. Unfortunately for expungements/record sealing/pardon customers they are more often than not the ones that require personalized legal services. Every case and every state are different. How you plead your case today has a direct impact on what, if any, options are available to you down the road. In no way should these types of services be "production line" services in my opinion.
It's a truism in freelancing that lawyers are terrible clients in multiple ways, so it comes as no surprise that the tech industry devoted to their businesses is not filled with the best people and/or solutions for their needs.
So - I have to ask (as a Graduate AI student, but no specific familiarity with the e-discovery domain) why is this the reputation? Like the applications don't work well? The salesmen don't know what they are peddling? I guess basically - could you extrapolate a little more on this group?
Someone else said it: lawyers are the worst clients, especially law firms. Too many know-it-alls who think the world should bend to their will. When I left my big law firm, there was a partner down the hall who made his secretary print his emails every morning and dictated his responses to her. Try dragging him into the 21st century and you'll see what I mean.
I've read through these reviews- pretty wild how they openly attack anyone who has a negative experience with them, instead of demonstrating drive to fully resolve issues. Being sympathetic, positive and following through are customer service basics, and they are just flailing here.
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird someone would hire a law firm to expunge a record and than publicly comment/review the service on Facebook? whats the point of wiping a record and than publicly sharing you had a record?
It is interesting. There are several factors at play. The chances of a random review on FB showing up are much lower than a background check when applying for a job. The "returning citizen" community is large in the US and while not a "tight" community, it is tight in the sense that they do talk and recommend companies that positively help them. Many also have a feeling of being wronged by the "system" and when someone takes advantage of them they have no problem letting them know.
I am really sorry you are wasting your talent on marketplace like this. Wish I could help you get better work.
Behavior like this, from this dude Kevin, well that is normal on marketplaces like this. If you are experienced, you should always steer clear when you see people talk random stuff.
Just so you know, you inadvertently included Kevin's email address in one of the screenshots. You blurred it out from the "from" section, but it's also showing in a "flagged as spam" yellow box. I'm sure this wasn't your intention.
A freelance marketplace is very much against the idea of freelancing. You are basically working for the marketplace with little freedom to design the actual work processes your way. Everything is geared towards getting positive reviews and thus getting more work through the marketplace. A vicious, underpaid circle.
Sure it works great for building contacts when you are not really visible yet. After you land a few gigs and have work, references and talent to show for, you should really abandon it asap. Better even, not start with it because the gamified nature will lure you in to do more gigs.
> A freelance marketplace is very much against the idea of freelancing.
Exactly. The point of freelancing is working for yourself, not as a vassal of a third party. That is why etymology is important, even when the initial meaning of a word has changed. A "freelance platform" or "marketplace" only makes sense for you as a freelancer if you own it (i.e. your self hosted site, portfolio or blog, etc.)
What I learned from this is not to ignore the warning signs of a psychopath client. Because you can easily get sucked in to a bad situation regardless of your good intentions, and you can't rely on the marketplace to resolve these disputes in your favor. This scenario can also play out on other freelancing sites, and it can also happen if you solicit clients directly and they turn out to be well-connected.
I have to disagree. This is not how the business world works. If a client is being an ass, you have the right to fire them. Upwork doesn't afford you this opportunity unless you want to see your JSS drop by dozens of points.
Totally agree with the article, and I am more than certain that such acts and extortionate behaviour are widespread on the platform.
It seems it is part of their business model to allow clients in developed countries to find people in developing countries (all with weak legal systems and corruption) to commit illegal acts (both violations of public and private law). Just look at how many jobs involve rewriting, scraping, penetration testing (really a guise for hacking others sites) modifying existing copyrighted content to circumvent laws.
Upwork as middleman profits -- and takes a blind eye to all this corruption - since cross border police investigations are so difficult to manage when dealing with corrupt countries.
In my case, I had my competitors procuring hackers off Upwork to take down my site. We found out because one person who was contacted on Upwork to bring my site down actually contacted me via my site and provided screenshots and other evidence. There was literally a job posted requesting contractors to take my site down.
We raised this with Upwork. They did nothing.
Guess what they said?
Their customer support asked if I had proof that my site had been hacked by the specific person who posted the job on Upwork and that if had suffered financial loss as a result of the hacking! It wasn't merely enough for their client to procure contractors on the platform to commit an illegal act. They wanted proof that I suffered financial loss!!
However, I can say that we are considering a civil suit against them. It would be interesting to see how this impacts their brand.
Note: Please forgive the messy and unstructured writing. I've been writing it while walking the streets of Central London shopping for X-mas gifts.
You want to add you contact info to your HN bio. I thought you did a reasonable writeup and would consider contracting with you for this sort of work. I will avoid Upwork based on their appalling behavior here and lack of willingness to engage and accept their mistakes.
I'm not surprised in the least. One of the reasons I have avoided UpWork/Elance is that it seems like every other job is for something blatantly unethical (and perhaps illegal). I don't even have to ask for details for such jobs, anyone technical can figure out exactly what they're trying to do (rip off competitor, cheat Google, flout some service's ToS, etc. etc.).
Please do go through with it for all the obvious public service reasons on to 8 of your own recompense. IANAL but it seems there's a vase for criminal negligence there too.
I had my competitors procuring hackers off upwork to take down my site. We found out because one person who was contacted on upwork to bring my site down actually contacted me and provided screenshots and other evidence.
We raised this with upwork. They did nothing. They allow illegal conduct.
I think that the freelance marketplace is not good for the freelance economy as a whole. A lot of the time, it creates a race to the bottom as far as pricing, and you have to compete with workers overseas undercutting you at every corner.
When I first got started freelancing, I used eLance (which is now UpWork). I had a similar experience with a client, they suspended my account for 2+ months, and I won the dispute at the end. If I didn't have my own clients outside of eLance, I would have been screwed and not even able to pay my rent. After that, I stopped using the service and haven't looked back 4 years later.
I have a friend who actually does know someone on the executive leadership team at UpWork, I just emailed him with your article - hopefully something positive can come of that. I really hate it when all around bad human beings go around and try to make people's lives harder.
I'll slightly disagree with the view about "the race to the bottom".
Most of the market is always in the bottom, whatever the market is. Upwork/elance/whatever just make it stand out.
Most of the work is low paying shit by shit clients who have no clue what they are doing. (Nothing special. It's the same with physical companies to physically work at :D).
As a decent freelancer who wanna do decent work for a decent client, you've gotta filter aggressively.
Never, ever give a price break without a scope change. Apart from the obvious $/hr benefits, it's great way to figure out if the person on the other end of the line is an abusive psychopath. A professional will understand that you're trying to help them achieve a realistic value for their budget. A psychopath will take it as a personal affront and become transparently manipulative and/or abusive. This is a great time to cut off contact before it escalates to the level shown here.
The real problem is: the conflict resolution process at Upwork is utterly Kafkaesque.
Even if you have a perfect five stars reputation for two years, all it takes is one upset jerk and you are done at Upwork. Eventually you will step on someones having a bad day if you stay there enough.
After you make a good reputation in those market places you can command a higher fee - perhaps they want you out at this point so they can get work for other skilled professionals that are undercharging in order to build reputation.
I've heard this complaint many times about upwork. They step all over freelancers and you are presumed guilty. Thanks for taking the time to write this up and I hope people will heed your warning.
I disagree. My conclusion is that Upwork must be avoided at all costs. Anyway discoverability is reached on Github and by blogging in this day and age, Upwork is the remnant of a bygone era IMHO.
Such a massive opinion against Upwork makes me also worry. It almost sounds like i have to build other ways of reaching my customers as if too many people feel like this, Upwork may go under.
Sorry you feel so bad guys. I made over a million bucks on Upwork and my customers are happy, many work with me over years, and the only time i got in serious trouble was actually the only time when i tried to trick my customer myself, so i was entirely at fault.
Any publicity is good publicity so I don't think it will help.
We need more people like Peter Thiel. With these many years of work, there must be a few dozen lawsuits that could be funded to take these shitheads down.
"$100 an hour is more than our CEO makes so I'm not sure we can budget $1500 for this".
Don't bill hourly! I know this sounds like a very silly example (it's not even logically coherent) but reasoning like this gets deployed all the time, even with sophisticated clients. People have anchoring price points for hourly rates that they don't have for other billing structures. Fixing this to make more money is literally as simple as "switch to daily billing".
Just thinking out loud here (haven't tried this) but maybe a better approach would be to not mention time. Simply ask for project specs and break it down into priced components if need be.
$1500 at $100 an hour sounds expensive if you're comparing to the CEO's salary. But $1500 for a piece of sales lead infrastructure that has to be built but can't be off the shelf bought. That sounds reasonable.
Heading off the objections you'll get to this: the downside to fixed-price billing is that it maximally exposes the worker both to errors in their own estimation and also to errors in specifications provided by client, and to scope changes. Fixed-price bidding forces the consultant to shoulder a lot of risk.
That's fine, if you're sophisticated. Certainly I think fixed-price bids are smarter than hourly billing. In a fixed-price bid, you get to describe the business impact of what you're doing, which can be huge even if the task is relatively simple, and then put a dollar figure next to that impact. Almost any number you come up with is going to at least sound sane in that context. It's the more favorable setting in which to present the comparison of value and price.
What I like better though is the hybrid approach. I still remember someone on HN saying that this was the first original approach they had heard to pricing consulting work --- which blew my mind, since it was simply the way I was taught by my partners to bid projects, and presumably the way they were taught as well.
The approach is this:
Come up with a fixed price for the work you want to do, and simultaneously an estimate of the number of days you believe that work will take. You can divide the former by the latter to arrive at a daily rate. In your bid, focus on the total price of the engagement, but "show your work" in terms of the number of billable days and your day rate. Include a clause stating that overages will be billed at that daily rate as well.
To most clients, this is the moral equivalent of a fixed-price bid, and they'll treat it like one. But it de-risks the project for you.
As you do more projects, you'll get a better sense of what your real daily rate is (it's higher than you think it is now). You can tune your bids so that you keep a fixed daily rate but still value-price your engagements. By the time you're routinely employing this kind of finesse, you'll have enough traction to easily figure these kinds of things out for yourself.
Thank you for this tip. I've always steered clear of fixed bids because it seemed simply unrealistic with software engineering. The suggestion of adding a daily rate after the fixed bid makes sense and seems to solve the aforementioned concern. I'll try that out next time.
This is definitely a way better approach than hourly billing, for sure.
On the flipside, stating daily billing is not much different than hourly since the client will just divide by 8 (usually). I stated my daily rate after hearing it from you and Patrick and Brennan Dunn, and one client just said - ok so your rate is "$xxx" per hour?"
My point is that daily billing is an improvement over hourly, and with your approach of an overall fixed price and also daily that's a great approach, but the client still knows a daily rate is essentially hourly. A better approach is retainer pricing if not a fixed one-time project!
Even if your client does the division --- and many won't, because, remember, it's usually not their money they're spending, so what really matters is whether the number you presented fits into the abstraction of their budget --- if you're going to negotiate, you're better off negotiating in a frame where a $100 difference is insignificant to your outcome than one in which a $100 difference is devastating.
I'm not sure I get the point (besides using days for the estimation, which is a good practice). So in the end you are doing it on a fixed-price term, but you're stating a daily rate as well, for scope changes. (Which you'll still have to argue about, and you're still left with the estimation errors and the arguments about the specification errors.)
Or did I miss something? (Or maybe there are a lot of people, who will not state a rate for the out-of-scope work and then they'll get into trouble when trying to ask money for that?)
On a side note, a few years ago I worked with a company (as a project owner) that only works on a daily rate base. However, what they offered is that they created an estimate, that contained, among others a 30% 'risk buffer' and their offer was that if they use that up (in addition to the base bid, of course) then they'll reduce their price to their cost (0 profit) level. Which basically means that it only covers the salary of the developer (plus the office space, supporting staff, etc.).
That meant a 33% reduction at that time from their prices, which is nice to in case of a project overrun, and of course is a kind of a warrant for the client that the company will do its best that the project is on time and that the estimate is accurate.
I still use the same idea/format when rarely doing estimates for potential clients, but I'm not sure how well it works with freelancers. Whether they can figure out a '0 profit' reduced price for themselves. (Maybe that could be calculated based on the 'if I work 8 hours per day, without any holidays/sick leave/spending time on new project' assumption.) The point is that it should be convincingly low for the client, but not extra cheap.
Very sorry to hear it. I've employed many on oDesk then Upwork over the years and almost always have great experiences with freelancers. In a rare case when I did have an issue, customer support wasn't very good from the hiring side either, fyi.
Also I think they shot themselves in the foot with the big price hike. Previously freelancers and I would just keep using their platform throughout working relationships. Now we use it like a dating app, meet a freelancer, work a project or two to build trust, and then leave the platform to handle payments on our own.
I'm not sure how this agreement could be enforced. How could Upwork possibly find out that a freelancer has made a deal with a customer outside of their site?
Thank you for sharing your experience, I am closing my account. But do you have any similar (or not) service you recommend me to use ? As a student I work with a company through this platform. Thanks by advance
Thank you for sharing your experience, I am closing my account. But do you have any similar (or not) service you recommend me to use ? As a student I work with a company through this platform. Thanks by advance
273 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadI think your way of doing things is far better and something I've actually been working.
Appreciate the comment buddy, have a good Sunday
More interesting, is the behaviour of Upwork. With such a clear trail of abusive behaviour from the said "Client", Upwork still decides to terminate the guy's account. If you use Upwork, you are a sharecropper. And the landlords are capricious and have no loyalty to the replaceable tenants.
I hope this gets some traction through HN to bring it to the attention of the right people.
I am currently looking for a Freelancing platform and also looked at upwork. Thanks for that, will avoid them!
My advice, get a blog. Write about your experience within industry. My best example would be a man called Simo Ahava, whom writes about GTM and GA. Join Slack groups and communities and just network.
I highly doubt he knows the CEO and even if he did, would said CEO actually act on such an inconsequential thing. I mean, imagine the PR meltdown from such an act.
Anyway, time for some tea and a chillout. Have a good Sunday :)
I have had absolutely no success with Upwork at all and had been reaching the point of walking away from it and what should I see but this post.
I want, actually desperately need, to be working outside my day job. I'm out of my element. I realized I had to start a blog and have done so and am writing a series of articles relevant to my knowledge and experience.
Aside from that, how might you recommend I make contacts to have long term work with good clients? Your comment is the first I've ever seen about "join Slack groups" - where would I go to get started doing that?
A million thanks if you bother to read this, a million more if you reply :)
Yes, it really is one of those things which you say to yourself 'Oh, it'll never happen to me', then actually it does. I'm the 3rd person I personally know of that's had this happen to them. So I think it's more prolific than it seems.
Hope you're having a good Sunday Erklik
> Click Accounts menu, choose Settings, then Contact Info
You may have to add a missing security question before it shows the form with the "delete my account" link.
I run a site that helps ex-offenders find jobs, resources, etc.. and it is always frustrating to see companies that take advantage of a vulnerable group. Not to dismiss the OP and the evidence against them is pretty overwhelming, but there are always two-sides to every story. I have removed the link and references to them and their parent firm as a resource from our site. While we aren't a huge player in the industry, we are growing fast simply because we provide personal help if we can and try to treat everyone fair. I refuse to risk that reputation on a potential bad apple. It's easier just to remove them now, and if down the road this comes out as a simple misunderstanding or whatever, I am happy to add them back. But for now, to me at least, it is better to be safe than sorry and not risk my users paying some greedy company to be treated poorly.
Months with nothing and then a couple of good reviews. Like: Oh! We haven't given ourself 5stars in a while, lets add some.
Behavior like this, from this dude Kevin, well that is normal on marketplaces like this. If you are experienced, you should always steer clear when you see people talk random stuff.
Sure it works great for building contacts when you are not really visible yet. After you land a few gigs and have work, references and talent to show for, you should really abandon it asap. Better even, not start with it because the gamified nature will lure you in to do more gigs.
Exactly. The point of freelancing is working for yourself, not as a vassal of a third party. That is why etymology is important, even when the initial meaning of a word has changed. A "freelance platform" or "marketplace" only makes sense for you as a freelancer if you own it (i.e. your self hosted site, portfolio or blog, etc.)
It seems it is part of their business model to allow clients in developed countries to find people in developing countries (all with weak legal systems and corruption) to commit illegal acts (both violations of public and private law). Just look at how many jobs involve rewriting, scraping, penetration testing (really a guise for hacking others sites) modifying existing copyrighted content to circumvent laws.
Upwork as middleman profits -- and takes a blind eye to all this corruption - since cross border police investigations are so difficult to manage when dealing with corrupt countries.
In my case, I had my competitors procuring hackers off Upwork to take down my site. We found out because one person who was contacted on Upwork to bring my site down actually contacted me via my site and provided screenshots and other evidence. There was literally a job posted requesting contractors to take my site down.
We raised this with Upwork. They did nothing.
Guess what they said?
Their customer support asked if I had proof that my site had been hacked by the specific person who posted the job on Upwork and that if had suffered financial loss as a result of the hacking! It wasn't merely enough for their client to procure contractors on the platform to commit an illegal act. They wanted proof that I suffered financial loss!!
However, I can say that we are considering a civil suit against them. It would be interesting to see how this impacts their brand.
Note: Please forgive the messy and unstructured writing. I've been writing it while walking the streets of Central London shopping for X-mas gifts.
It's like it's just now the norm for these things to happen.
If you'd like to, i'd be happy to post your story in an edit below mine. I know this isn't the first time it's happened.
If you want to contact me, it's shad @ the domain in my twitter bio.
Good luck!
Strange, I know. I don't get it either.
I had my competitors procuring hackers off upwork to take down my site. We found out because one person who was contacted on upwork to bring my site down actually contacted me and provided screenshots and other evidence.
We raised this with upwork. They did nothing. They allow illegal conduct.
When I first got started freelancing, I used eLance (which is now UpWork). I had a similar experience with a client, they suspended my account for 2+ months, and I won the dispute at the end. If I didn't have my own clients outside of eLance, I would have been screwed and not even able to pay my rent. After that, I stopped using the service and haven't looked back 4 years later.
I have a friend who actually does know someone on the executive leadership team at UpWork, I just emailed him with your article - hopefully something positive can come of that. I really hate it when all around bad human beings go around and try to make people's lives harder.
Most of the market is always in the bottom, whatever the market is. Upwork/elance/whatever just make it stand out.
Most of the work is low paying shit by shit clients who have no clue what they are doing. (Nothing special. It's the same with physical companies to physically work at :D).
As a decent freelancer who wanna do decent work for a decent client, you've gotta filter aggressively.
Even if you have a perfect five stars reputation for two years, all it takes is one upset jerk and you are done at Upwork. Eventually you will step on someones having a bad day if you stay there enough.
After you make a good reputation in those market places you can command a higher fee - perhaps they want you out at this point so they can get work for other skilled professionals that are undercharging in order to build reputation.
Still, Upwork is an excellent mechanism for building professional network with both customers and freelancers and should just be used wisely.
Sorry you feel so bad guys. I made over a million bucks on Upwork and my customers are happy, many work with me over years, and the only time i got in serious trouble was actually the only time when i tried to trick my customer myself, so i was entirely at fault.
We need more people like Peter Thiel. With these many years of work, there must be a few dozen lawsuits that could be funded to take these shitheads down.
And I was about to try out some freelance work just to get some income going.
Best of luck. You got a raw deal on that one.
"$100 an hour is more than our CEO makes so I'm not sure we can budget $1500 for this".
Don't bill hourly! I know this sounds like a very silly example (it's not even logically coherent) but reasoning like this gets deployed all the time, even with sophisticated clients. People have anchoring price points for hourly rates that they don't have for other billing structures. Fixing this to make more money is literally as simple as "switch to daily billing".
> Don't bill hourly!
Also, it's not $100 per hour, it's likely $100 per two hours or more. It's not like a freelancer has constant work inflow at 40 hours per week.
$1500 at $100 an hour sounds expensive if you're comparing to the CEO's salary. But $1500 for a piece of sales lead infrastructure that has to be built but can't be off the shelf bought. That sounds reasonable.
That's fine, if you're sophisticated. Certainly I think fixed-price bids are smarter than hourly billing. In a fixed-price bid, you get to describe the business impact of what you're doing, which can be huge even if the task is relatively simple, and then put a dollar figure next to that impact. Almost any number you come up with is going to at least sound sane in that context. It's the more favorable setting in which to present the comparison of value and price.
What I like better though is the hybrid approach. I still remember someone on HN saying that this was the first original approach they had heard to pricing consulting work --- which blew my mind, since it was simply the way I was taught by my partners to bid projects, and presumably the way they were taught as well.
The approach is this:
Come up with a fixed price for the work you want to do, and simultaneously an estimate of the number of days you believe that work will take. You can divide the former by the latter to arrive at a daily rate. In your bid, focus on the total price of the engagement, but "show your work" in terms of the number of billable days and your day rate. Include a clause stating that overages will be billed at that daily rate as well.
To most clients, this is the moral equivalent of a fixed-price bid, and they'll treat it like one. But it de-risks the project for you.
As you do more projects, you'll get a better sense of what your real daily rate is (it's higher than you think it is now). You can tune your bids so that you keep a fixed daily rate but still value-price your engagements. By the time you're routinely employing this kind of finesse, you'll have enough traction to easily figure these kinds of things out for yourself.
On the flipside, stating daily billing is not much different than hourly since the client will just divide by 8 (usually). I stated my daily rate after hearing it from you and Patrick and Brennan Dunn, and one client just said - ok so your rate is "$xxx" per hour?"
My point is that daily billing is an improvement over hourly, and with your approach of an overall fixed price and also daily that's a great approach, but the client still knows a daily rate is essentially hourly. A better approach is retainer pricing if not a fixed one-time project!
Or did I miss something? (Or maybe there are a lot of people, who will not state a rate for the out-of-scope work and then they'll get into trouble when trying to ask money for that?)
That meant a 33% reduction at that time from their prices, which is nice to in case of a project overrun, and of course is a kind of a warrant for the client that the company will do its best that the project is on time and that the estimate is accurate.
I still use the same idea/format when rarely doing estimates for potential clients, but I'm not sure how well it works with freelancers. Whether they can figure out a '0 profit' reduced price for themselves. (Maybe that could be calculated based on the 'if I work 8 hours per day, without any holidays/sick leave/spending time on new project' assumption.) The point is that it should be convincingly low for the client, but not extra cheap.
Also I think they shot themselves in the foot with the big price hike. Previously freelancers and I would just keep using their platform throughout working relationships. Now we use it like a dating app, meet a freelancer, work a project or two to build trust, and then leave the platform to handle payments on our own.
just for your info to avoid possible bad things
For example, for WordPress development, Codeable.com is really good - they take care of both clients and developers
For writing, TextBroker or CopyWriterToday might pay more to writers with a better quality control and escrow system.
Designers - if you can get contracted out by Lightboard or others, you'll do much better