Fees: 20% fee for first £500 is FAR TOO HIGH
Making sellers lose £20 in every £100 they earn is far too much
20% loss upto £500 woth a client means every new client gained will have a 20% tax on them as average life vale of a client is less than £500 in total !!
so EVERY new job I get I lose 20% so £20 in every £100 in effect a 20% sales tax !!!
Why is this service fee so large ?
It makes what I do uneconomic. !
Am I meant to charge this ON TOP of my invoice to buyers ?
4 Jul 2018
at 11:34:46
PPH Service Fee for Invoice #2044379-2 related to Job produce your 3 YR
Business Plan with full Finances & Marketing SOLD at £325
Tax 20% (and other commissions on sale) - £78.00
so a big loss of £78
This cannot be good for sellers
or buyers as sellers will add the 20 % to the price, or ask for payment outside PPH !!!
Buyers will be worse off as they get higher prices !!
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I just realized that there was a change in the fees. The t&c page says I got a notification, but I am a full time freelancer and I work 10 hours a day with this website open and I didn't see a word (maybe one email a month ago on my trash folder?). But if Xenos says something on Facebook I am spammed into hell to read the stupid blog.
This % will have to be transferred to the buyers, because I am cannot afford to pay more fees than what I already pay (which is A LOT), and I am not sure if you are aware of this but the clients are already paying an extra 10% fee. In result, the same work I did last month for lets say, €200, this month will have to be at least €220 for a new client. So this person will have to pay €242 for a €200 job in order to establish a relationship with a new freelancer. Also, there is no rewards system now. There is no point in conducting all my business here, previously there was a reward of a lower fee if I did all my invoicing via PPH but now, unless it is a very old client, the fees are higher than anywhere else, so I can diversify my platforms. And I am not happy with bringing new clients either to use the zero fees program, because based on the history of the company, it will probably be eliminated overnight and I will only realize that it was changed when I see that in my last €400 invoice, there are €80 missing.
And that last scale is ridiculous: 3.5% for clients with over €6000? This is a place that puts entrepreneurs together, most of the people I've met here have a very limited budget and they are doing the best they can with their resources, spending €6000 on graphic design is an absurdity.
PPH needs to stop treating us as their clients and start thinking of us freelancers as their partners. The clients should be the buyers not the sellers, that is the only way to be sure that this is a good long term idea. Things like increasing the fees every 6 months, plus extra fees for services, plus taxes over the fees, plus charging per bid (which after paying this insane fees looks like an insult), are quite demeaning and make people think about things like: "maybe it's time to move on".
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Totally disgusted with this PPH. If this is how you treat your sellers, just wait to see how we are going to begin to treat you. We will close our accounts and there go your profits. Yours is the worst business model ever. My child in Reception has better business smarts and ethics than you. This is 100% unacceptable and morally wrong in so many ways.
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Hi all- there is another thread here on this that you might find interesting-https://support.peopleperhour.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360003426247-ANOTHER-Fee-Increase-Are-you-joking-
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I agree I am considering moving away from PPHour altogether now - which is a shame as I have been on here providing a service for a while now.
20% taken up to £500 come on PPHour get real!
I also had a client the other day asking me why he had been invoiced 10% over the total price. So it also seems that PPHour take a cut on the invoice buyers side too of 10%!!
WInner winner chicken dinner plus all the trimmings for PPHour.
Thing is this will drive people away - buyers and sellers alike.
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Totally agree with you Caroline. It seems all the jobs are now 'HIGH VALUE' at 3 credits per job even if they are entry level pay. I have already started declining so many invites telling the buyer that because PPH takes 20% off I just won't work for them, no matter how much they want to pay me. Seems more sensible to just carry on with my own clients outside of the platform since this place doesn't offer any seller protection whatsoever.
PPH you disgust me!
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Unbelievably, it still says in the user guide that PPH don't charge fees to buyers for the basic service and the statement that they do charge for use of a debit/credit card (there is no other option) would appear to be illegal under recent legislation.
As a Buyer
PPH doesn't charge Buyers any fee for using the marketplace to find and use freelancing talent, however there are two types of fees you may encounter:
- Payment processing fees are passed on to you when you use a credit / debit card or PayPal to pay for services on PPH.
- Posting a Job on PPH is completely free however if you decide to feature your Job listing as Urgent, you will pay a small fee.
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I feel your pain. That 20% fee has actually been around a while, since the previous service charge change. It was a "punishment" for low earners / irregular users to the site. As a way of awarding "loyalty", regular users maintaining a decent monthly income weren't affected by any change.
The way I understand the new change is that if you just work with existing clients you won't be affected. It's only when you take on new clients that you'll be hit with the 20% hike. For me, things stay the same.
Having outside clients and other commitments, I've always been a low user on PPH. I didn't like being "punished" for that, but the new change made me raise my eyebrows knowing how many people that was going to upset.
It's sad, really. PPH used to be fair and decent for everyone but now I think it's lost the plot.
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Totally agree. The site has become uneconomic for me. I never got a notification about it so it seems incredibly sneaky.
I've been a loyal user of this site for years but I think this will be the nail in the coffin for me as I don't think buyers will be willing to pay the extra 20% I'll have to add to my prices.
It uses to be such a great site when I joined.
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I suspect that many buyers are simply doing direct deals with the sellers which, in my opinion, wouldn't generally happen if the charges were perceived as 'fair'.
While PPH were offering a good service at a fair price, it was in everybody's interest to support them, but that hasn't been the situation for a while.
As the buyer often turns out to be different from the party holding the 'personal' PPH account, there seem very little legal basis to enforce the 10,000+ words of 'Terms & Conditions'.
That's even if PPH had the wherewithal to detect such an 'off-the-books' arrangement.
They don't even acknowledge dozens of buyers openly saying 'never again' on this forum (and elsewhere) so it's unlikely that they would notice any arrangements not fitting their neat 'world view'.
The whole PPH setup works for everybody if all parties 'play fair' but it is clearly in a state of collapse following recent unreasonable rate increases.
20% seller fees and 10% buyer fees are simply 'too much' for the simple act of 'introducing A to B'.
If I were employed by a contract agency on an hourly basis, they wouldn't charge me anything (as it's illegal to do so) for finding me a job and would add something like a 10%-15% mark-up, to the client charges, for running the contract.
That would include prompt payment for authorised timesheets, irrespective of whether the customer has paid.
In the EU 'agency' situation, it's illegal to 'pay when the customer pays'.
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Some old posts from last year (right after the introduction of the 10% buyer fees and 20% seller fees)
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dear pph colleagues, please don't forget to sign petition to Xenios
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