Vote - Original 15%-3,5% service fee VS new 20% Fee structure.
Hello Everyone.
PPH wants to know whether the new fee structure suits the majority of sellers or not? please vote and comment (Comment is important)
If you don't know how to vote, click the Up arrow button next to the post title.
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CS Response :
If you want your buyers to vote go here :
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We definitely are not in favour in terms with the new service fees charges which PPH has been charging now with respect to seller-buyer relationship. PPH gives us the reason for this new service fees charges to be in perspective to each Buyer:
First £500 earned with a Buyer (excl. VAT) 20%
£500 - £5,000 earned with a Buyer 7.5%
Over £5,000 earned with a Buyer 3.5%
*Work billed under the Zero Commission scheme is excludedYet PPH considers projects of £150 a high value job with about 3 credit point to purchase. This is so ridiculous.
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don't really use this site at all now, just do maybe one job a month to keep ranking a float for advertisement purposes but there's far better avenues for freelance work now rather than this rip off site. unfortunately they've shot themselves in the foot shitting on all there freelancers with the service fees. i've watched this site plummet ever since the new charges.
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I find it hilarious too that they are now taking further measures to punish their sellers - As if the new charges weren't punishing enough, now if you don't reply to a direct message within 24hrs, your ranking drops for TWO WEEKS?? Seems like a major over-reaction, especially when they are relying on their top sellers in order to take their cut...shooting yourself in the foot at every stage by either discouraging people from working through the site, or actively stopping them working through the site, eh PPH?
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Oh hello strangers! Haha. I went from billing around £4k a month on the site to about £150 which I only do to keep my advertising rankings there like others have said and it's been quite bloody liberating not having to rely on them - thankfully my business as a whole hasn't suffered, and I still get the odd old client popping up there or sending through small pieces. I am quite happy that we all stuck to our guns! I think they thought we were bluffing!
One funny thing - I get one of my clients PPH emails. He keeps getting invited to events they are throwing etc. I used to get invited to all of them (in fact I used to organise a lot of them) but somehow since the fee increase my invite must have got lost in the post ;o)
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Like most of you I hardly do anything through PPH anymore; I used to get regular offers of relevant jobs (too many actually) but don't think I've seen a single notification in three or four months now. I used to be quite highly ranked (almost broke top 15) for programming work. That in itself can't have been a great sign for the platform as I wouldn't have expected to be that anywhere near that high as I'd have though programming would be one of the most competitive groups and much harder to climb the rankings in.
After two of my clients insisted on moving off the platform and onto direct PayPal payments instead that accounts for basically all of my semi-regular work as well; initially I tried to resist moving off site, to respect the terms and conditions and keep my ranking high, but once they told me what they'd been paying, compared to what I thought I was charging them, and on top of what I had already been paying, I didn't really have any choice but to accept, as PPH hasn't given me any reason to stay loyal.
I don't know how PPH expects to make any money; the only way their business model is viable is if there is good reason for sellers to continue using the platform rather than just use it to connect with clients before moving off site, and with the huge slice PPH is taking that just isn't the case. Even if job offers were still rolling in I'd still have reconsidered because it's just not good value. Even the previous system wasn't great, but it was at least more predictable, and better for sellers who did a lot of smaller pick up jobs.
PPH should either be charging a lot less, and only to the sellers (who can adjust their prices to compensate) or should be offering a lot more to add value; a basic (and expensive) escrow service just isn't enough.
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I do have clients who I have worked with long term - invoicing over 10k each in some cases - and therefore the new fee system does work out better for me where these clients are concerned.
However the new fee system makes it impossible to take on any new clients. All new leads have dried up on here and I'm only working now with long standing clients - except for those that have stopped using the platform due to the costs they are also exposed to.
I'm not going to be paying 20% of project fees on any platform. Invoicing £500.00 and then loosing £100.00 + vat is just pointless.
Small projects are likewise pointless. If I offer an hourly for £40.00 I'm loosing around £10.00. We are trying to make a living on here after all.
Not to mention low quality leads that this site now generates.
If PPH is going to have any future, we needs decent leads, some sort of minimum pricing policy to prevent clients offering unacceptably low budgets. And most importantly a fee system that makes taking on work worthwhile.
Clients also should be removed from the site if they are offering consistently and unreasonably low budgets.
I'd rather pay a sensible monthly fee for working on the site, maybe the fee could be discounted based on performance. I also think clients should also have a fixed service fee per project, again this could be discounted for decent clients.
Best regards,
Dave Linford
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even with long standing clients the fees are still crap in comparison to other competitors. i can agree that projects should be prevented from being posted if they're too low. especially the"high budget" jobs, they're usually 150 and cost 3 credits. which they usually bottle out of. pointless!
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Might be worth looking at sites like https://techlancer.co.uk/, sellers fees are only 10% and seeing how dead it is at pph there is no other choice but to sign up for other sites
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I still keep an eye on PPH and have had a couple of decent jobs in the last 3 months, but generally the standard of project on offer is appalling. I have just had a look at an invitation to bid and the project budget was £6. Where do I even begin to say what's wrong with that? In order to get my target of £30 per hour I would need 12 of those in an hour. (£6 budget is £5 + VAT and PPH take £2.50 minimum fee).
PPH are not the worst. I had an "invitation to interview" on Upwork last week for a $5 project, which was even less.
Fortunately I have other work, including some that originally came from PPH. I've never asked a client to take work off site but some insist. They don't want to pay money to an organisation with such a poor reputation and low level of service. Not only are they not adding any value to the work we do, they hide their fees (look at the posts on the buyers' forum for the complaints over that) and they don't provide a contact telephone number. I'm embarrassed whenever I do take on a new client through PPH because they are so awful to deal with and I don't want my reputation to be dragged down to their level. -
Things have been dead here for me for a while too - since the hike in fees, I've had to put my prices up and I feel it has put a lot of potential clients off - I'm lucky that I have a bunch of regulars who keep me going, but I've certainly been looking for other avenues (successfully I might add) - I dunno, maybe it's a good thing - I had been concerned for a while that I had put too many eggs in one basket with regards to PPH, and this was the push I needed to get out there and start networking more
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Just noticed that PPH have also stopped freelancers from cancelling orders or issuing refunds. Got the usual intransigence when I queried it. Have seriously had enough of this site. It used to pretty good but know it's simply not worth my while. Am forking out 200 to 300 quid or more in fees each month and they're not giving anything back in return.
Anyone know the best alternatives?
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Yes they changed that a while back: https://www.peopleperhour.com/blog/blogroll/product-update-new-refund-process/
Not sure whether this process still allows for the leaving of a 1 star feedback.
I've gone through it twice - one for an incorrect order and another for work that didn't reach the client (for some reason my message with the Word doc didn't reach the client).
In both cases PPH refunded it, leaving no feedback for either buyer or seller.
It's a bit problematic because while the refund is in process, you can't talk with the client as the workstream is frozen. However I presume they've removed the buyer fee for considering a refund, which is welcome news.
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Completely agree with Steven. Just totted up the whole year April 2018 - April 2019, and what with the PPH fees at varying rates, Featured Hourlies buys, Featured Profile buys, Proposal Credit purchases.... I'm now looking at a figure of over £12,200 that PPH has taken from me, with an average of 15%-20% of take each month. The number of buyers I have passed the £5,000 mark in over 4 years on this platform I can count on one hand... I write 500 words for £20 a pop, which means I have to write 125,000 words of content for a single client to pass that 5k mark - but which of my clients needs that much content for their blog or website I ask? Answer is none of them, unless I drop on with some kind of digital marketing agency who themselves have multiple clients requiring content. I used to charge 25% less, but now have to charge 25% more to make up for it - which is not giving the clients the value for money they deserve than if we'd have gone direct.
Simply not acceptable. This is probably the final month I'll be hanging around on this site for orders under £500, they can kiss goodbye to me handling all these small shitty £20 jobs for them at 24% charges, plus the buyers themselves are getting charged 10%, so from the project as a whole PPH is collecting about a third of it. Quite sickening. I have already branched out last year to other sites, and this debacle with PPH fees has even forced me into shelling out a few grand for a brand new platform of my own which is hopefully going to be running at the start of May - an exclusive content writing platform for native English writers only, 0% buyer fees, mainly UK/US clients only, 10% seller fees - www.anglocontent.com
Give me a shout on LinkedIn if you're a top cert or level 5 writer and wish to request an account later on this month, covering everything from blog posts to website content to case studies, CV writing and video scripts - 20 kinds of content writing in total. Clients are also going to have to request an account also to weed out the low payers and scammers as PPH seems to fling the doors open for (in my category at least). Sincerely wish I could have started a brand new PPH-style site with the cash instead to help you guys in other categories out too have a reliable affordable platform, there's nothing out there at all really, but content writing is my passion, and perhaps it's something I could do in the future, or even form a collective of us top certs across multiple categories to build one together from scratch, I'd be up for that, who knows.
Anyway, rant over, return to the old fee structure or this platform is going to dry up fast, in my category virtually all the competition has dried up in the past 6 months which is a positive in one way, but a crying shame at the same time. PPH are plain lying about the number of active freelancers on this site, and I can almost guarantee there is only a small number of us keeping this site afloat.
Scott Anfield
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I did my accounts and they have only had £1800 this year from me as I point blank refused to accept the new fees. It's done me a favour to be honest! I only bill 2 clients a month through here now and they are both ones that I have hit the £5k threshold with. So basically I used to bill £3000 - £4000 a month and they would receive 3.5 - 7.5% of that, which I happily paid. Now they are getting 3.5% of barely anything. I kept recurring clients on there way past the 12 months that you needed to as it suited everyone, but when they started charging me 20% and my clients 10% for the exact same service a month later I was finally done. Such a shame, I used to be a brand ambassador for them, organised all their events etc and was a massive advocate but greed just got the better of them and their absolute disregard for freelancer concerns was the final straw of me having enough!
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