Low-paying clients
The number of low-paying clients are increasing in peopleperhour.com which could prove to be lethal to this freelancing platform. There should be an option to report clients who are seeking for freelancers to work at peanuts. May be a button like "client asked to work for low rates" can be included. Else, this trend would continue and this would affect all freelancers.
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I have to agree. I work in the legal sector. I accept that drafting a document for a client on PPH will be at a far lower price than someone walking through the door of our Practice. However, I have over the last two years seen the costs expectation and standard of freelancer working in this sector dropping through the floor.
Addressing the latter, there is nothing at present in place on PPH to "vet" a freelancer wanting to set up as a Solicitor, Paralegal or Barrister. Apart from the major issue that describing yourself as such when you are not both qualified and on the register is illegal punishable in the UK by a term in Prison of up to 10 years and £50,000 fine. PPH is aiding this activity to go on leaving itself open to prosecution by allowing advertisements by people who they have not vetted and documented the qualification. The fine for this in the UK courts is unlimited. PPH needs to ask every single person offering "Legal Services", for a copy of their qualification and current license number. Each year I have to renew my Solicitors Regulatory Authority membership (for consumer protection under the Compensation scheme) and Personal Indemnity Insurance (for consumer protection in case of malpractice) every year. My details, areas of practice that I am legally obliged to have.
Secondly, because people are not qualified, they are selling templates from Google which are both inferior and do not do what they client needs. You can buy a template from Google for a cheap as £10.00, they bid £30.00 and make a profit. Meanwhile, the client has something that is genuinely not worth the paper its written on. When they come to rely on the document, they end up finding they are in trouble.
What good does that do PPH? Freelancer.com asks for certficates, regulator membership and registration number and in my own personal expereince, require you to update it each year on its renewal, or the system removes you from being able to provide the document. This gives a clear demarcation, between "qualified" and "not qualified" and the yeld for a document is higher.
I have found PPH allowing non qualified people to claim they are "lawyers" has started to drive me away from bidding on jobs. It is simply not worth doing anything for £30-£70.00 with respect to legal documents.
Can PPH look into this?
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I'm from USA and I can't seem to get any jobs on PPH. Jobs that I'm bidding for are closing at $3 an hour which is great for India but not USA. I have 18 years experience as a SQL programmer (expert) and these bids are asking for expert but at $3 USD. Does anyone know of a freelancer site that has realistic payouts? I'm currently on Upwork but it too is starting to look like PPH
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Yup.. Just had one myself.. Have banged on about this issue for a few yesr but they still promote "the lowest price". People come in with an expectation of paying peanuts for legitimate work.. Look at the conversation I had below with 1 guy.. Believes we don't have expenses or need to pay taxes.. Bargain basement mentality.. Where do you think he go that idea??
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I absolutely agree here. The amount of people listing jobs with a fee that works out at less than minimum wage is absolutely shocking. Especially for skilled work. For a website taking quite a high percentage from the freelancers earnings for themselves there isn't enough being done to ensure quality of the jobs.
I'm not saying that every listing should be screened to ensure that the fee is reasonable before it goes live but there definitely needs to be some sort of simple feature that can allow a freelancer to report a job price as unsuitably low and then that total of clicks be made visible to other freelancers viewing the same job to act as a deterrent from accepting ridiculous prices. Because unfortunately as long as someone is willing to work for a stupidly low amount then others will never get what they are worth.
It would be even better if a buyers account could be reviewed by PPH staff and possibly receive a penalty if say 3 or 5 reports were made for listing at unreasonably low amounts.
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They've already got a report low paying job feature.. The clincher now is.. If anyone posts a job with a price of over £100.. Its classed as "High Value"... and will cost you 2 proposal credits..
Also the commission you pay on each job is 25%.. So the squeeze on freelancers is on.. Not only are the jobs piddly paying.. But now you spend twice the No of proposals, so you need to buy more.. and to top it off you pay a 25% on whatever meagre earning you make.. Tadaaaa!.. lol -
I'm with you here, the amount that people expect to pay for quality work is, quite frankly, a bad joke.
Now part of this is due to competing with people in countries (e.g. India) who are just charging less money. But that being said, unless this site just wants to be an agent for the third world at the expense of Western workers, there's no incentive for us to try and compete on this market.
I work in 3D modelling, and to be honest, 99% of jobs in that category, if priced fairly, would "high value", but they're not. PPH is losing out here too, not just us freelancers, as you take a 25% cut, Surely you want 25% of more, rather than 25% of less?
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I am with all of you. The prices are always going down, I am spending more time on making proposals than obtaining some advantages.
When I win something it is because I am one of the few or because the price was too low.Sometimes when I don't win, I ask to a client the reason. Someone asked me to do the SAME job of the proposal, WITH MORE SERVICES, for 200 € less than what I proposed.
If you add that a lot of buyers are not paying on time, (I still am waiting for 200 € from a month)... it is a waste of time.
I think I am going to leave the platform is something is not going to change.
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