Is Upwork Legit | How to Grow Your Freelancing Practice
If you’re just starting out as a freelancer, you may need to leverage job boards and marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr. And even as an established freelancer, many use marketplaces continuously to maintain and grow their freelancing career.
If you haven’t had any experience with them, you may be wondering: is Upwork legit? Today, we’ll focus specifically on the Upwork platform and outline some important details so you can decide if Upwork is legit.
What is Upwork?
Upwork is a freelancing platform that connects freelancers and clients, it’s among the largest platforms out there with Fiverr, Freelancer.com, Toptal, etc. Put simply, Upwork is a website that acts as a job board for both freelancers to find jobs and businesses/individuals to post jobs.
Upwork is a website that enables freelancers to create a profile and highlight their skill set with resume pieces, project examples, pictures and biographies. Similarly, clients can post job postings that seek a particular set of skills or expertise. Here’s an example of what my profile looks like on Upwork:
In sum, Upwork algorithmically matches a freelancer’s skill sets to a job posting that matches that skillset. It’s up to the freelancer to win the client through a series of interviews, questions and sometimes sample work.
At the end of the day, Upwork isn’t the only option when it comes to growing your freelancing practice, so is Upwork a legitimate platform for freelancers to win clients and grow? Let’s find out.
Is Upwork Legit? | A Close Look at Freelancing Platforms
First and foremost, I myself am a freelancer on Upwork, have completed and currently manage multiple projects, and I have also hired freelancers on Upwork. Therefore, I have actual firsthand experience with the platform and can speak to its qualities. In short, Upwork and other large freelancing platforms are legit.
Upwork is a publicly traded company, listed under the ticker UPWK and has sufficient access to capital. This means that I would not expect Upwork to suddenly go underwater and bankrupt, leaving its customers and freelancers in the dust. If that isn’t convincing enough, here are some statistics from Upwork’s 2021 financial reports. I’ve summarized the important points, so you can take a look at how Upwork has grown to be one of the largest platforms for freelance work.
Source: Upwork SEC Filings
Upwork has over 205,000 clients in 180 countries, including large enterprises like Indeed.com, and facilitated over $3.5 billion in transactions in 2021 alone.
In summary, if you’re working with large freelancing platforms, you can expect a decent level of legitimacy for these reasons:
Upwork and other similar platforms service hundreds of thousands of clients and freelancers, with hundreds of millions, or billions of value in transactions
Freelancing platforms like Upwork have been around for some time and continue to grow year over year, heavily indicating that freelancing skills are a growing need and these platforms are here to serve that need
Even large corporates and enterprises like Microsoft are using platforms like Upwork to source freelance talent
This doesn’t mean that you won’t find scammers or shady listings, however, it does mean that many of the basic foundational risks are ironed out by the platform. It’s up to you to use your best discretion and weed out poor listings.
How is Upwork Legit? Building Trust in the Gig Economy
Upwork is legit because it highlights profile accolades and metrics in an easy-to-digest and succinct way, so you can quickly decide if a posting looks scammy. Within the first few minutes of looking at a posting, you can answer basic, but critical questions:
How does a freelancer get paid? A freelancer’s profile on Upwork is connected to your bank account, and the client’s profile is also connected to their bank account. When projects or milestones are completed, payment is automatically issued from the client. No invoicing, or reminder to client for payment. At the same time, you can see if a client has their payment logistics verified, giving you additional trust that you will in fact get paid
How trustworthy is a potential job? Trustworthiness of a job posting can be gauged by a few profile metrics that are highlighted for freelancers:
how many projects have the client previously hired for
how much the client has paid in past engagements
payment verification status
client’s account age and history
avg. hourly rate client paid for projects
review score from past engagements
Take a look at this job posting which showcases all of the metrics mentioned above:
With all of this said, the odds that you apply for a posting, get through interview stages, and complete work that results in a total scam are very slim on a platform like Upwork. Thus, Upwork is very legit when it comes to sourcing freelancing gigs.
Despite having these protections in place, we still have some recommended best practices when you’re just starting out on Upwork to avoid scams, or sketchy clients.
9 Best Upwork Practices for Freelancers
Research any potential job posting outside of Upwork. If the information is available, research that ABC Company off of Upwork to get additional information to judge whether the posting is legitimate. Ask yourself the following questions:
Does the company even have a website?
Does the company website look legitimate?
Does the job posting make sense for the company’s industry?
Who is on the management team, what are their backgrounds?
Look for social media profiles outside of Upwork. If the company has a social media profile, you can look for social interactions and form an opinion on how legitimate the posting and company is
Look at past reviews–are there any highly negative reviews with specific red flags from past freelancers?
Look at the company’s total spend–a high total spend (>$10k) indicates that the company/client is familiar with freelancers, with Upwork, and is actively hiring for gigs continuously. A company/client with no spend and no track record doesn’t automatically mean it’s not legit. However, greater caution should be applied–especially if it pays very low.
Look at the company’s number of jobs posted and hire rate. For example, a really high number of jobs posted with a really low hire rate can indicate that the company is extremely picky and is looking to make the perfect hire to fit their needs, with little regard to the freelancer. This may be a red flag for me.
The job posting/description itself. This goes without saying, but any job posting that has an extremely long description describing a complicated task or series of tasks, with baffling requirements for software experience, soft skills, licenses, multiple industries, and then the expected pay is only like $50/hr is a HUGE red flag. Clients like these are looking to take advantage of freelancers and do not value their worth.
Don’t get attached to the posting. Have a conversation with the client/company, and use that to judge the posting, instead of the posting itself. Often, the manager of the posting will be your lead contact and can make or break a freelancing gig.
Don’t bother with postings that are a race to the bottom. Many postings on large job board platforms are a battle to hire the lowest possible cost freelancer available. I avoid these postings entirely. Not only are the clients typically low quality, it’s ultra competitive to try and compete with rates only. Personally, I would not bother with anything below $25/hr, even when starting out. If you combine this rule with looking at the appropriate metrics from above, you should weed out 99% of low quality postings. You are worth more than this.
Finally, use your gut. If you feel like a listing conveys a potentially demanding client who is going to ask for 1-hour weekly calls that are unnecessary, that is all time and effort you could be dedicating to growing your practice instead. If you feel like it might not be worth it, it’s likely it’s not.
Even though Upwork is legit and you can genuinely find work and build your practice on it, there are definitely some things to watch out for that newcomers may not know. Here are some of our pointers.
3 Tips for Freelancers Starting Out on Upwork
Expect to Pay a Fee on Upwork
Yes–Upwork charges fees. Those fees go towards maintaining the platform, marketing to draw both freelancers and clients to use the platform and facilitating trust in the freelancing platform. Here’s how the fees shake out exactly:
The more you earn with a single client, the less you’ll pay in fees with that client. It’s important to note that the fee applies on a client basis. So, unfortunately, if you keep acquiring new clients and don’t meet the thresholds where the lower fee %s kick in, you will pay 20% for each new client. In our experience, the fee is steep at 20%, however, you’re paying for Upwork’s facilitation of finding clients, trust, payment and invoicing, and client communication which saves you a lot of time and management effort. For many, it’s well worth the fees.
As your freelancing practice becomes more established, you may find yourself acquiring clients off Upwork. In fact, many clients may even want to work off Upwork and “Enterprise” level clients on Upwork only have a 10% fee. These are larger clients that do a lot of work on Upwork, so if you can win one of these clients, you can save a lot on fees!
It May Take Time to Find Good Clients
Because freelancing marketplaces are saturated and you’re competing with freelancers globally, it can be hard to find that first client on the platform. However, with practice, you can find the right set of filters and preferences to win gigs. For example, you may want to consider filtering for hourly rates to weed out clients that only want to pay bottom dollar. You may also consider filtering for clients that are only looking for US-based freelancers–these clients tend to value communication, time management and professionalism more and are naturally willing to pay a premium, instead of competing for the cheapest available rates. Lastly, you can build out your own set of criteria to hit a sweet spot using keywords, and narrowed intent.
It Can Be Risky to Build Your Practice Entirely on Upwork
If your freelancing career really takes off and all of your clients are on Upwork..it can be a bit risky. Maybe one day you accidentally violate Upwork’s Terms of Service and you get suspended and lose all your clients. This could be a devastating event for your freelancing practice. So, having all of your clients on Upwork can be a risky investment. At the end of the day, you don’t really own anything that is on Upwork, Upwork does. Keep that in mind.
It’s worth noting though, that this kind of agreement is not exclusive to Upwork. So don’t freak out thinking that Upwork is going to take everything away from you. In fact, if you own a Facebook page, Instagram profile, Uber profile, etc. etc. similar terms of service apply as well. You can definitely lose your business or clients on any of the above platforms if you violate their terms. A good practice for any freelancer is to always have a secondary connection to your clients–reach out to them on LinkedIn and connect with them after your contract on Upwork has started.
What Can I Do to Rely Less on Upwork?
There are a number of things you can do to diversify your client base.
Try Cold Outreach
Cold emailing, LinkedIn messaging, Facebook messaging, etc. can still work. Freelancers still acquire and maintain clients this way, so craft your message and pitch to win some clients and diversify your client base. The important thing to remember with cold outreach is to not get discouraged by a low success rate, take any responses you get as feedback to improve your messaging and brand and build up from there.
Maintain Your Client Relationships
Believe it or not, but word of mouth can be a powerful way to acquire new clients. That is why it’s critical for a freelancer to maintain good relationships with clients, especially after doing good work. The next time you’re looking to expand your practice, you should really be looking at your existing list of clients first. Assuming you’ve done a good job and have a good relationship with past clients, these people would be happy to recommend your skillset to others in their network. Think about it: you’ve already completed work for them, and they enjoyed working with you. They understand what your output and communication are like–why wouldn’t they recommend you if they have colleagues who are also in need of freelance work?
The key here is staying top of mind. Don’t wait until you’re in dire need of new clients to reach out to past clients with a request. Instead, send out periodic check-in emails, or request for a quick catch up and treat clients like potential mentors. You can get creative and send unique holiday gifts, but don’t get tacky.
FAQs:
Can I trust Upwork?
Yes—Upwork has been around since 2015 and has grown every year to serve more customers and clients. Upwork is among the largest freelancing platforms serving over 205,000 clients in over 180 countries.
Is working on Upwork worth it?
For new and established freelancers, Upwork is a great platform to acquire and maintain client relationships. Upwork does the heavy lifting for many aspects of freelancing such as matching profiles, invoicing, payments and general vetting of job postings. As long as you are aware of the fees and terms of service, anyone can take advantage of Upwork and grow their freelancing practice.
Can you make money off Upwork?
Absolutely—Upwork is a tool that can help you grow your freelancing practice tremendously. Even though there are fees for using the service, Upwork does the heavy lifting when it comes to matching freelancer skills to job postings, payment facilitation, invoicing, and communication. Though the fees may seem steep, it’s an all-inclusive service that you would have to manage otherwise. The ability to make money on Upwork depends entirely on your ability to create a strong portfolio, have good communication skills, and being confident in selling your craft.
