ANOTHER Fee Increase? Are you joking?
Sellers like myself are struggling with the race to the bottom mentality on this site already. At least 95%+ of my clients are below the 700 threshold -- I'll be paying 20% on everything.
Your fees are outrageous -- the 3.50 fee per invoice was bad enough, now it's even more. Did you even announce this increase? You will lose the high quality freelancers and the site will continue it's decline if you continue down this path.
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I stopped bidding on jobs about 4-6 months ago. That's when I noticed the quality of jobs had dropped significantly. As a Top Cert I wasn't winning anything. Before I was winning about half of jobs I was bidding, sometimes as high as 80%. I now rely on clients contacting me or purchasing an hourlie.
I know a lot of freelancers are feeling the same but they are scared to speak out
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Totally agree, Simon. I also don't actually have any hourlies as since the very beginning I've solely relied on job invites and selections plus browsing all the recently available projects, a couple of times a day. But at least since April it's been harder and harder to find any suitable job, an now this out of the blue 300% increase on service fess is coming as the final nail in the coffin...
And what bothers me most is that even the new fees are in place since last Sunday, it seems to me that only a tiny minority (as there are no more then a dozen of different users on these 3 or 4 different threads on this very same subject) is having real concerns about the full implications of this outrageous fee scheme everybody in here is now forced to put up with. I mean where are the others up to 350 Top cert sellers? Or every single one, except those already in here, is only selling services to previous clients, which all are above the £500 and £5,000 limits?
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To all Sellers, Here is an official response from PPH, please max share the post
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I think that most sellers aren't even aware that this forum exists.
I am in the same situation were hourlies stopped selling a long time ago and I rely on repeating customers and direct contact, since the bidding is useless. I cannot find good jobs and when I finally find something that might work for me with more than 1 "€" sign, I am unable to win it because I am competing with 30 bids with lower budgets. Mine must look outrageous. But until last year, I had a very high chance of winning most of my bids, around 70-80% of the proposals I sent were accepted.
Did they finally killed this place? I have been expecting this but I didn't think it would happen so soon :/
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PPH - Please have a rethink before we ALL go under.
Ever heard the expression 'less is more?' It certainly is. Think about it for a second. Greed will be everyone's downfall. Fair fees and incentives will ATTRACT custom. You're pricing everyone out of business.
I haven't seen one comment in favour of this - and furthermore haven't seen one reply from yourselves telling us what we don't already know. Yes, we're aware of your new fee structure, too aware, there's no money coming in.
You're pulling the rug out from under my feet and my family's feet. Please do something about this, as only you have the power to.... We can't magic up trade for ourselves. Clients have got to win tenders elsewhere too. I'm worried about finances in a major way. In times of austerity, why make things even harder?
Feeling desperate about how i'm even going to make the council tax money this month, let alone anything else.
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@Nancy, @Sean
There is a new thread about this with a voting currently taking place in here:
Please vote and voice your concerns in there as well.
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Dear Fortune
Your note here to Meri on Thursday doesn't tell her anything she doesn't already know - that costs are rising. Your response that you would be upset if you were her, is patronising. Meri is defenceless, she can't alter your fees or drum up trade to push her over price fee boundaries. A lot of buyers on here are start ups or students. They will never buy the amount you're asking - they're one-offs. You're penalising everybody and thinking we're stupid. There has not been ANY response from PPH which justifies the rise, just placating us instead.
Please pass this thread to higher management. Do you even care that you're causing extreme financial worry to families. It's taken us years to establish our livelihoods and you're just taking it away. Rest assured, this is not the end of the matter. It will not end well. PLEASE DO SOMETHING POSITIVE RATHER THAN POSTING PLACATING REPLIES
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Yes, there has been a continual reduction for months. The website's Alexa ranking continues to drop. Presumably they are receiving less traffic.
Instead of marketing and improving the platform with useful new features -- they are squeezing freelancers for profit. Attacking our livelihoods. Perhaps they want to sell the website to another company and want to increase profit figures. Who knows.
Because it's not sustainable for sellers to pay fees this high. We'd have to all increase rates and that would mean less sales.
PPH's decision to move Hourlies to a sub-menu also hurts established sellers who have a highly rated Hourlie. Most new buyers will simply post a job. I think PPH made this change to further increase profits by getting freelancers to buy proposal credits.
Most of my work comes from Hourlies. It has constantly been declining and the Hourly ranking system is still quite broken with low quality sellers appearing above high quality ones in many cases.
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Dear pph colleagues, please don't forget to sign petition to Xenios
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This is another unsatisfactory reply I have received from the customer 'support' team when I said they hadn't answered my deep concern about the fees increase- I give up.
Hi again Meri,
I hope I find you well. Thank you for the response. I am sorry for my delayed reply though we have been receiving an unprecedented amount of requests which has resulted in delays, but we are working hard to provide each and every user with the appropriate attention.
I am really sorry if my previous response has not clarified the issue regarding the new fee scheme. Can you please specify your request so I can further look into it and provide a sufficient explanation?WHERE ARE PPH? Why aren't they responding- why haven't they responded first thing on Monday morning? There have been hundreds of comments and devastating stories of people struggling to survive- and absolutely nothing.
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It isn't just the online support that we are missing. There is no telephone number to contact. In contrast, when I started selling online and opened an account with WorldPay to collect credit card payments, they insisted that I had a telephone number on my website. PPH have a turnover of several million pounds and they can't even have somebody answering a phone.
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Honestly, it's heart breaking to see the massive chunk of money I am losing with each job. 20% is an absurdly high amount, almost 3 times what I normally paid each month.
It has greatly reduced my motivation to work on this platform. I am still getting budget buyers who attempt to argue my prices down to a low point, then what I received is smashed by high fees. What's the point?
No comment from PPH? The groundswell will only get bigger as freelancers realise the new fee is in place. They barely announced it and haven';t posted it on their blog.
I think Xenios is a coward for hiding this new fee arrangement. A single email -- really?? If he wants to turn this into a race to the bottom site full of low quality freelancers, he is heading in the right direction. He is pushing quality providers out the door.
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Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely that we'll get any response from PPH (or at least in here), but more worrying is that there are less then 50 votes on the other thread, which is basically just tiny 10% of the Top CERTs, so the vast majority either doesn't care about this or doesn't actually know that the issue is discussed and voted for/against in here.
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They probably don't even know the fee has changed. They will realised during this month, when they check their statements.
The most ridiculous part is people per hour pretending that this change is advantageous to sellers. What a joke.
I have to scramble to find another platform. All of the time I spent cultivating clients on this platform and a 100% rating has been a waste.
I still think Xenios is going to flog the entire site off to Upwork. He is just trying to maximise the profit by squeezing freelancers to get more money for it. He has betrayed the community. He is not an ethical person.
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I too think it must be being sold. But bizarre because I wouldn't pay much for it at the moment because the site is like a ghost town. There are hardly any job being posted. Hourlies have dried up. Direct contacts (which I used to get maybe 10 a week) I now get one if I'm lucky.
I think it is mostly likely that other TOP CERT sellers don't even know this forum exists. I didn't until recently yet have been on the site for years. Too busy making them money! Now, they may have raised their fees but I bet their income has dropped as no one is paying it as no work is coming in. Futile pointless exercise of bad business from their point of view. Ruining our livelihoods from ours.
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PPH don't care you are right, there has been one announcement and it basically put up or shut up, unacceptable, there has been no research and there is not one single person who is happy with this.
Whats happened to the traffic, where is the hourlie tabs now?
It is simply all about money, increased cost for credits, features, refund requests, now invoices to 20%, feature profiles, feature hourlie per skills - its absolutely squeezing money and its not sustainable to be on here.
I am looking at other avenues until there is a serious change.
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Agree that this could actually be a case of most Top CERTs not even being aware of what's going on with the new scheme, as that's quite clear now that PPH did everything in their power to keep this under the cover, or even employ dirty marketing practices by trying to advertise it (code for plain lie) as exactly the opposite of what the new scheme actually is. I didn't get any email (as I've already check it twice and I never delete any email and barely getting any spam), but I understand that those who got it were mislead to believe that they'll paying less fees, or at least on the long run... And the response we've got from Natalie (PPH CS manager) also mention this medium and long term benefit BS.
But PPH fail to say a word about what qualifies as "medium and long term". Well, obviously this is a very vaguely defined concept which could mean completely different periods of times for different individuals or different situations, but if there is one clear thing about the "medium and long term" is that you can NEVER invoke it or talk about it without STABILITY and PREDICTABILITY. And these are precisely two things PPH has completely fail to provide over the last couple of years in respect to the service fees structure, with this being like the third time (and most outrageous one) change in as many years.
Are they able to promise they will never increase these fees again in the "medium and long term"? I highly doubt so...
Haven't they actually promised precisely this in regards to the loyal freelancers, not longer ago then last year? Only to just throw it out of the window, with complete disregard to the loyal freelancers, a year later...
Does this qualify as stability and predictability from PPH, so we can even talk about medium and long term concepts?
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That's right Tom -- how are we meant to trust a platform that just suddenly triples fees. I don't think the company is stable. They are making many bad decisions, just look at what they have done to hourlies. They were a useful tool for buyers who just want to quickly buy a standard service. Now, PPH has hidden the menu item and has removed branding from hourlies (just showing freelancer faces). Presumably pushing traffic to Posting Jobs because they have a higher profit margin there. I have no trust in this platform anymore.
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The main issue with this fee increase is that we are not going to be able to transfer it to customers, as I initially hoped. I have been looking at the jobs posted these last few days and they are all very low budget. The list has become either very simple one time jobs or "I need the cheapest available". When bidding it feels absurd to add the increase, since the page (even when it says €€€) tells me that I should bid, let's say, 60, and my number is 250. Which was 200 until last week and even then I was having problems getting new clients.
Not only the jobs are super low budget, they have become WEIRD. I am in graphic design and illustration, and last year it was hard to decide what should I bid in, I was actually careful to avoid taking on more than I could handle. Now, I can reach page 10 on the list and only bid twice. The jobs are absurdly specific with super low budgets (I need someone to design Candy Crush II for €25).
For example: there is someone asking for a house design (architectural plans). They have photos of the site and of the lake in front. The bids are around $900. So basically, you would be designing someone's house for around $700. That sounds about right! -.-
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I have a bit of a theory about this. In fact, I have two.
One is that PPH are enacting their exit strategy. The site is around 10 years old, therefore it is probably about the right timing to pass it on to a competitor. This means that they need to have the profits looking as good as possible. They've tried lots of ways over the last year or two to do this and have not succeeded, so they are taking this final step. They spend as little as possible (marketing has dropped to almost nothing) and scrape together as much profit as possible and bingo - you are snapped up by Upwork.
Or, they are looking to change the business model completely to focus on large employers/buyers rather than small customers. Equally this means larger groups of freelancers (ie firms rather than individuals) servicing these larger employers or buyers. The model works perfectly for groups of freelancers working together with large buyers on huge contracts. they can quickly build up to the threshold and the overall input from PPH is minimal. essentially these businesses are carrying out their normal employment on this platform for a fee without needing to do any of their normal expensive HR. PPH makes more money from these larger customers over time as their buyer fees have not changed, but they are looked after by freelancers who welcome the fact they can work with one employer under the umbrella of PPH and pay lowered fees. It is employment hidden as the gig economy.
Now as an aside... if this is the case, isn't PPH actually acting as an employer and risking running foul of IR35? We are being encouraged to work with only one or two clients to increase the amount of work we do with them. Therefore HMRC could legitimately suggest we are employed, not freelance.
My theories may not be fully formed and maybe someone else has a better way to explain it. But these are my thoughts based on this obvious push towards larger customers.
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