I've heard mixed reviews, it would be interesting to see some comprehensive comparison.

Rates are going to be driven by cost of living as much as expertise, so it's not unfeasible to imagine skilled developers in Malaysia / China / Russia / India who didn't get a green card (or didn't want one) being able to comfortably sell their services for < $10 per hour.

Sure, and for every ten or so of them, there's someone more reasonable. ;) I'm not sure what the next babushka doll is, but my point is that the jobs are not completely uniform and that within the variation lies _some_ value.

for an mvp? hell yaah.

tbh, there should be a price picker. you specify a timeline. you specify quality, and then price is calculated for you.

this communicates that your want mvp, or real development. And for each the site can provide heuristics. that's where the site's secret sauce can come from.

I'd like to see that "Bug per 1K LoC" drop down list. There could even be an ISO rating and you could fail coders for not meeting their minimum bug counts. As a dev I could just skip over problems as long as I was on target for my bug count.

Genius!

Well. Listen, you get what you pay for.

However I think BUG count is not the issue. It's code quality. What if I told you:

"I need a POS implementation of Foo, it doesn't have to be maintainable but has to work with a taaaaad bit of ability to patch it up. I am trying to prove a concept is viable and show it off to like 50 people. I will rewrite this code if I decide to implement the concept. Also I want this done in ~ 1 week"

Should that not drive down the price and time required?

That means probably minimal tests, minimal abstractions, lots of copy-pasta, but still within decent coding guidelines and meets the needs