A few comments- we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments. We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them. The vast majority of projects do. Also you have a chance to not accept the project as a freelancer if Milestone payments have not been created after you've been awarded. So I can't see the issue here.
Rounding of fees? I have no idea what you are talking about here. We round project commissions to the cent, like everyone else.
Automated bidding- we changed our system some time ago to dramatically stop bid spam. I'm not sure how recently you have used the site. We have removed "public" bids entirely. Now you can only leave one private bid, this has got rid of the problem you talk about.
I would have to disagree with you for disputes and support. We have the largest support team in the entire industry with 250 people in our own facility that operate 24x7x365 and speak 10 languages. We have a paralegal team doing disputes that I believe is the most sophisticated in the industry as well in terms of how it resolves issues.
Our business is going from strength to strength and we are the only company that is publicly listed, so our financials are transparent. Our revenue is growing at almost double the growth rate of our nearest competitors, so I would have also disagree about your comments about the state of the site.
Happy to answer any other questions you may have or you can email me directly at [email protected]. Also if you shoot me your account username I will have someone take a look at it.
Regards Matt
However, as for the other matters:
> we do have escrows by default- called Milestone Payments.
Actually, you don't have them by default :-). By your own admitting:
> We don't however force people to use them if the two parties decide to come to an arrangement where they don't want to use them.
My (admittedly foggy, please correct me if I'm wrong) memory tells me that RAC had escrows by default, i.e. the buyer had to place the money in RAC's escrow before the coder could start work. I distinctly remember that RAC's seller instructions clearly said you should not start coding before the project is awarded to you, because there is no way to be sure the buyer actually has the money to pay you. When the project was awarded, the money was placed in escrow. I actually had a dispute settled over this matter: my client had simply vanished. I waited for two weeks before telling him I'd get the project into arbitration if I don't receive feedback, and waited another three before getting it into arbitration. The RAC arbitrator decided that if he failed to respond within some reasonable period (a couple of weeks, again), I'd get the money, because the deliverable I had submitted was indeed in accordance with what had been agreed.
Freelancer.com doesn't force buyers to do that, giving rise to the following phenomenon: a scammer opens an account -- with zero reviews but a verified payment method -- and posts a job ad. It's well-paid for something otherwise reasonably simple, like some content writing, but the job has to be done quickly and the buyer claims he can't offer a milestone payment that quickly -- he doesn't have the money on hand, bank transfer takes time (he usually lists his country to be something like Zambia or Congo, where it's probably fairly safe to assume that banks don't go too smoothly with all the firing in the street and whatnot). Since the pay is higher than average, a lot of freelancers are happy to do it. Needless to say, they never get their money.
I'm sorry to say, but when this happened, your large support team did absolutely nothing. They simply reminded her that she should ask for a milestone payment, which a lot of buyers actually don't want to do for credible, or at the very least legitimate reasons. If you don't want to force people into escrowing, you should be able to deal with cases like these.
This wasn't an isolated incident because the same type of job ad appeared several times in the following weeks. We actually tried to warn other freelancers about it and we found at least another dozen people got the same treatment, quite possibly from the same guy who was opening different accounts, and from the same support team.
Edit: Oh yes, rounding of fees.
This page: http://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges/ claims that, for a free membership plan, Freelancer.com gets 10% of what gets paid to a freelancer, or 5 USD, whichever is greater. Fair enough.
But if I try to bid for 100 USD that gets paid to me, the bid now gets to 111.11 USD, which looks an awful lot closer to 11%.
I initially assumed this had something to do with including the 3% amount that the employer is charged for the posting, too, but it doesn't add up. I never really bothered understanding how it goes; as I mentioned in my other post, I haven't done freelance work on what is today Freelancer.com since the days it was still called Rent a Coder. But in the best case, this is poorly documented. I, for one, can't make sense of it, and I'm probably better at doing math than most freelancers who do content "writing" or social media promotion on your website.
Even later edit: just to be clear, I'm not trying to scold your business model, nor your efforts as a company. If your current model works for you, then it's awesome. Matters of finance and corporate politics are beyond either my possibilities and my wish to comprehend. Freelancer.com isn't doing bad financially (though, since I'm not living off its dividends, that's irrelevant to me) so I presume there are people for whom it makes world a better place. For me, it doesn't.
Being an old RAC then vWorker freelancer, I totally share weland's view.
Lately, I restarted on freelancer.com, and the amount of WTF moments that I faced are quite substantial. Let me give you a summary (and why I decided to move to elance):
-- The worker being constantly extorted in every corner of the site:
-Pay $5 in order to take a test.
-Pay more $ to get your bid in the first row/highlighted
-Pay some $ to unlock more BidsPerMonth and Skills
-Pay upfront 10% of every job you are awarded, even if the employer is determined to scam you and never pay
-What about a constant Ad to remind you that you can always choose to pay more. ...
-- Milestone payment is not defaulted, if the employer didnt made a milestone payment, we couldn't care less, we wont give you back the initial 10% fee (even if both agree to cancel), and you'll have a permanent "Work in Progress" job in your profile (until you decide to constantly harass the support team and wait few weeks)
--The website is a hassle:
- Everything is dynamically processed, slow loading, excessively simplified, and most pages cant be bookmarked
- Forced facebook-like communication!! seriously!!
- Using game mechanism to motivate workers is interesting(levels, badges, XP points ...), but most of it is actually useless/funny (Exp: 78000 credit point to have a 20min call with the CEO)
I remember that now with rentacoder, they had a great escrow system.
oDesk are good, they dont allow employers or freelancers to get away with much wrong doing, they re all I use now and I hope they do not change
I'm the CEO of Freelancer.com. How did the RAC escrow system differ? We don't have "expert guarantees" or reverse escrow, where the freelancer is required to put an escrow in the opposite direction, if that is what you mean? Other than that we have the same functionality.
Regards Matt
I really hope oDesk - Elance won't go the same way freelancer - vworker went.
I used to have an account of RentACode, a long time ago. It was mostly a good experience, considering the state of freelancing back then. When my significant otter got fired, I dug the account and handed it over to her -- it had a bunch of good reviews and some of them were for tech writing jobs, so I though it would be useful to her (she's not a programmer, she does marketing).
RAC had, in the meantime, become freelancer.com. The first thing it did was chew through the money I still had in my account -- two or three hundred dollars the withdrawal of which I had procrastinated for a long time, keeping them there in case I'd suddenly decide to take new jobs on RAC (then vWorker) again. I didn't get anything other than automated answers from their tech support, and eventually settled for that being dead money.
Now freelancer.com is a scammer's heaven. It doesn't have escrows by default, the rounding of of fees is done quite liberally, there seems to be no mechanism to stop automatic bidding (with ridiculous sums that do nothing but bring the average bid price down, since it's obvious that whatever is behind those posts is never awarded a project), and their support for disputes is unhelpful at best.
My gf is actually still unemployed and still gets projects on Freelancer every once in a while, but after being scammed twice -- with copious help through lack of reaction by Freelancer -- both her and her clients generally eschew its payment system altogether. She usually insists on a 100% milestone on Freelancer.com the first time she works with them, and then it's PayPal all the way.
The eschewing of the payment system seems to be quite generalized, because their lack of reaction and real buyer and seller protection basically means people end up paying fees for something that is then little more than a glorified job advertising website, since it otherwise fails to offer anything for the (hefty) fees they take.
Freelancer.com is a pretty sore sight nowadays. I browse its range of contract offers every once in a while; there's generally nothing for me (I do systems programming and embedded stuff -- people don't usually hire freelancers to write operating systems or make gadgets, unsurprisingly), but most of the projects and most of the bids depress me. Ads along the lines of "looking for an app expert", looking for reasonably non-trivial applications that work on a gazillion of platforms, awarded to poor people for sums that seem small even to me.