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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Nick- they can and they will. I am already down about £500 this month from work I agreed on and worked on before the change came into effect- and I was blissfully none the wiser. On top of that I have gone from selling 1-2 high priced hourlies a week to nothing. I genuinely don't know how I am going to survive financially this month. Or the next.
There are no quality buyers or jobs left anymore, so how we can be expected to get up to £5,000 is beyond me. Even for those of us who do have repeat buyers, which I don't.
This thread is now pushed right down to the bottom as new topics come in- and we have heard nothing from PPH since the 'official' comment which wasn't in anyway helpful all those days ago.
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Oh Nick - that's a huge issue. You should open a ticket with PPH Support to see if you can have some kind of compensation. They can sometimes offer things like featured proposals, extra proposal credits etc. I doubt they would waive the fee though.
You might have to cut your losses and only do the amount of work that the invoice will cover. But under the T&Cs, the client will be within their rights to not pay at all as you have not delivered the job as agreed.
First step - contact PPH, then try renegotiating with your client.
I feel for you. What a horrible situation to be in.
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I have two medium jobs that started a couple of weeks ago and were finished after July 1rst. I cannot transfer the cost to the client in any case. How is that their fault? I don't want to loose the clients either, so I had to absorb the losses. If you complaint they will say: "we sent over an e-mail". Which almost no one got.
Sneaky sneaky.
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I have had two invoices paid today.
one for £45 had £10.80 taken (should be 20% or £9). and the other of £100 had £4.20 taken (should be 3.5% or £3.50).
Quite aside from the basic unfairness of this entire system - why am I paying more than the stated percentages? I don't pay or charge VAT.
Am I missing something?
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Actually, it is listed on a separate invoice if you search in Transactions and go to "PPH service fee" of that specific invoice #. I only learned from this a few months ago because I got paranoid with the fees and started checking them thoroughly. But it doesn't appear on the proposal or in the invoice (it doesn't show the fee either).
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Tell your clients about the increase. I've already told three, they were not happy, because they know it means a price increase.
Two of the buyers immediately had the response -- "Can I pay you via PayPal". That was their first thought. PeoplePerHour will lose out in the long run. They have made the company much less competitive.
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Hey Natalie and Fortune (aptly named considering the new cost of working on PPH)
Thanks for coming on and commenting at least. I saw the notification of the new fees back in June and took issue with it then. I'm not at all surprised that so few others did. It was a small highly spun email that could have been missed easily. No mention on the new fees on the blog or anywhere else on the site - simply because PPH knew what the reaction would be. Any chance Xenios could make a quick comment on the blog board? Didn't think so.
Natalie, you mentioned this would be good for top sellers. That's me, but I won't be for long. I started cutting down the business I do with PPH the moment I saw that email. You can see that by looking at my transaction history. I've been with the site some ten years typically invoicing £600 to £1000 every month, that is, until I seen that email. Last month was £400 and this month I've invoiced zero to date. Just to be clear, that's zero commission for PPH this month, as a direct result of the new pricing policy. Your commission 'has fallen off a cliff' to quote a PPH communication from one of the the many price increases over the years.
Since this site is now financially inviable to use, I like other 'TOP' users on here will reduce my activity further and eventually leave (just like I did with Elance/Upwork whose payment model you've copied with this new strategy). These are the professional freelancers that make you most commission, not the spammers and timewasters, or clients that post vague job postings and then disappear or direct freelancers to virus packages (like the one I reported yesterday). Instead of moderating these vague job postings, increasingly, I've had my messages moderated on the clarification board. I can only assume the reason for this is so I'll waste a bid (and my time) on a false job. I've had enough of that. I simply don't bother bidding.
It's game over for PPH. You simply won't be able to keep freelancers or clients engaged in this flawed, inviable, business model. And, quite frankly, I'm stunned that your management team don't see that.
Good luck.
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And the Autopay feature is throwing up errors. I've had three clients this month alone saying they can't accept my Autopay request and they get the following error:
"Something truly unexpected happened
This event was logged and our tech ninjas are on it!
Please contact us if you need need help on anything else."For me it will be nearly impossible to get to £500 billings with a client without Autopay
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12 days into the month and I've already been charged well over what I'd normally be charged for the whole month. Currently looking like a 300% rise in seller fees for no reason other than blind greed on the part of PPH. They say that they have consulted on this but I find that hard to believe. I've not met or talked to a seller yet that isn't going to lose out on this new fee regime.
Perhaps it's time the decent sellers on the site moved on and formed their own collective.
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I cannot believe this. My buyer just told me that the buyers fees have been raised too. This clearly opens the door for another site like this to take over this marketplace with fees that are fair and transparent. My £200 that I quoted and had to follow through on is going to have £48 taken from it for fees.. I find that greedy and not proper.. My clients are going to run away as I'm going to pass the fees onto them. PPH and sellers are a partnership but PPH is being abusive at this moment in time.
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