An Open Letter to People Per Hour: Please Comment Below on Payments
Dear People Per Hour,
I wanted to let you know just how much havoc, chaos and panic you have caused in my life since you announced your decision to subject us to the new payment clearance process and times. If you are a freelancer reading this, please comment below so we can try to support each other and so that we can let PPH know what damage this is causing us and that we, as freelancers, are not only the lifeblood of the platform but also real people with real lives and families to support.
I am a freelancer, but I am also a single parent to two young children. We have all lived through a year and a half of the most disruptive time in any of our lives due to the pandemic. I am sure it hasn’t escaped PPH’s attention that freelancers have had a rough ride during this time. I am mainly referring to the UK here as that is where I am from, but I am sure these problems are global for freelancers. As freelancers, we did not enjoy the benefits of furlough, of the Job Retention Scheme and many of us were not eligible for government grants or benefits. As we start to move out of the pandemic, many of us are reeling from the effects and have now been served a huge blow by PPH-a platform that is supposed to support us as freelancers and make our lives easier-by making us wait up to 18 days to receive money we have earned and worked hard for.
I don’t know about other freelancers, but my family relies solely on the money I earn from PPH and we live from invoice payment to invoice payment. We don’t live beyond our means, there is only me earning money and I work very hard.
On Friday, I came to the realisation that due to the new payment clearing processes, we did not have enough food to last us the weekend, let alone 18 more days. My rent was due on Friday, and I have not been able to pay that. So, we are hungry and on top of that I am now really anxious about not paying my rent. I earnt enough money this month to pay my rent and buy us food and everything on top, but it is sitting in my PPH account, and I cannot access it. This morning, my son’s school had to arrange a delivery from our local food bank. I have never, ever had to ask for anything like this before, but we had no choice.
I have not heard anything from PPH that makes me understand why they are doing what they are doing. I simply do not believe that in the world of instant payments, high tech and on-demand services why they need to hang on to our money for 18 days. It just won’t work for me in the long term, but at the moment, I am wondering what we will do in four days’ time when the food runs out, when I can’t pay my internet bill leading me not being able to work at all and when the stress of this will just be too much to bear.
I hope people don’t think I am being overdramatic, for some freelancers this will just be a frustrating experience, but for some of us, this is having real life, damaging effects on our lives and the lives of the people we love- and I am sure I am not alone.
Please comment below and tell PPH how this is affecting your life if you can.
Yours Sincerely,
Meri Williams
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@Gadi, ALL.
No problem. We're in this together. Still, I cannot agree more about the seller's bad taste. It's ironic someone claiming to be expert in SEO and social media marketing and to use such a random photo which can be so easily identified. This proves - time and again - vetting anything on PPH is not even in the minds of the people here . Anything goes.
This thread continues to provide more material for my planned book. PPH is quite a story!
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I just withdrew payment from up work
They took 5 days to verify the transaction from seller. which ended on 3rd august and i issue withdrawal request of 250 usd. in 5 minutes they have processed the withdrawal with a confirmation date of 4th august i.e tomorrow
Food for though for PPH Team
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I think PPH is dead meat. No way I am going to have a site hold payment for 14 days. They can do the security check while I do the work. Make the client wait 14 days. What they are really doing is giving the client a 14 day money back guarantee.
There is no way a freelancer that has worked for over three years, is still a risk. Or that two low producing months now makes the freelancer riskier. Base the wait on feedback. But still. When Upwork, guru and Freelancer all pay faster, hell even fiverr, why would a freelancer use PPH?
Not for me anymore.
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I have been following this from the side lines, but PPH is dead to me. I have 1 client left on here, I will finish this project and close my profile. It can't be that higher earning freelancers get priority, unless it is just for PPH's personal gain, ie. interest in the bank.
I have used PPH, Freelancer, Proz and other to start my business off in July 2019, I have now gained so many clients away from this platform that I don't need PPH anymore. So the joke is on them!
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@joseph
Sorry to hear you have become 'victim' of the new rules.
Try to register on other portals with short terms withdrawal options and/or direct client contact: proz.com, freelancer.com, fiverr.com, upwork.com, smartcat.io, localistars.com. Depending on your requirements though, I mainly work in translations.
Good luck!
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Guys, just to give you a benchmark to compare with PPH withdrawal processing time. I withdrew funds today from my Fiverr account - $5,000. Only one minute elapsed from the time I submitted the withdrawal request to the time it reached my PayPal account! It couldn't be more instant than that. I also submitted in a span of a few minutes a withdrawal request of £1,000 from PPH to my UK bank account. Almost 12 hours later and still no sign to those funds hitting the bank account... Even if you put aside the 14 days clearance period, the speed of processing is by far faster with the competition of PPH.
One more difference beyond processing time - Fiverr doesn't charge any withdrawal fee to PayPal but PPH is charging for it 1.9% withdrawal fee. Who is more competitive? :-)
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Joseph - Isn't it how it's supposed to work also in PPH? Why do we have Offers? (Formally named Hourlies) Why is the site called PeoplePerHour? I used to sell many of those Hourlies and now close to zero. The original concept was dumped in favor of a bidding system as in some other platforms wherein you need to bid with dozens of other sellers to win a job and probably for much less than your hourly worth. In this way, long running sellers with excellent reputation gets equal chance with new sellers who just try to make a name for themselves in the platform and win their first orders (inclined in selling their work for very cheap). You get no reward by PPH for being a long-time successful running seller. It's the complete opposite in Fiverr, wherein your gig sales and revenue drive you up in the search results ranking.
As for Fiverr success time - Yes, at the beginning you need to have some waiting period and be patient. HOWEVER, when you catch a wave after having some sales and garnering reviews, fresh new inquiries just knock on your door to the level that you cannot handle them anymore - The state where I'm in at the moment. The last time my Fiverr gig was up and running for 24 hours straight was on the 12th of September. That day I got about 20+ inquiries from 1,000 impressions and I then deactivated the gig. Since that deactivation day I've only been working in Fiverr with repeat buyers without ever needing to reactivate my gig to acquire new inquiries. In those 3 weeks that my Fiverr gig has been officially deactivated most of the time, I earned more than $3,000 while in the parallel period in PPH it was just $260... So which one do you think plays better?
BTW my £1,000 withdrawal request has already been approved by PPH. Must have been my lucky day because it only took 12 hours... In comparison with the $5,000 which was processed by Fiverr in a matter of seconds.
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@Eric & Karen san, no offense, but you cannot compare USA with UK. Americans clients are rude and very unprofessional. They want you to do the work for low budget and want the best work. I have been working here for about 6 years now and I didn't accept a single US client. American clients usually hire from Asia ( mainly India ) because people from there work for very low rate. I have also worked via Upwork and Fiverr, but the only area that helps me was PPH. They support new freelancers very much unlike Upwork.
UK + PPH is a gold for freelancers. PPH has helped when no one was able to, so I cannot speak anything ill about it.
Regarding what you said about working directly and outside the platform, I suggest you to not to do this. Working through the third party is very important in freelancing world.
Hope you understand.
Kind regards
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@Neil I agree for the most part with what you say about American clients, but I don't think that is the full picture. Like the UK clients, there are two categories and one set prefer to recruit freelancers from their own country and the others are looking for offshore work to be done as cheaply as possible and often they are rude and abusive as well. There seems to be a belief among some sections of America that the US dollar has somewhat more buying power overseas than it does in reality. I suspect there is a similar split among UK clients.
I have spent a lot of time looking for work on Upwork in recent months and I apply for more jobs there now than I do on PPH. I have had no success at all and I try to target my applications to reduce the amount of time I waste. Most of the good jobs there are American but I have no chance of getting them, and then there are the very cheap projects that I don't want to touch because they are typically $5 per project or $1 to $4 per hour.
PPH has always stood out for me because I have found serious UK clients who are prepared to pay sensible rates. The difference now is that those clients have gone, and that seems to have happened since the Covid pandemic started. There was always a lot of low quality work and scams, but I always classed that as annoying, but not relevant. There were also a lot of jobs in the middle that made good filler projects, but the budgets on those have dropped sharply, and something that might have been £60 a few years ago might be £15 or £20 now.
I don't think the loss of work is down to PPH, although they could make more of an effort to improve themselves. I suspect the UK economy is in a much worse state than is widely believed, and companies have cut their outsourcing budgets. I also think the work may have moved elsewhere, but I have not found it if it has. The online recruitment agencies like Reed and Indeed offer remote work, and perhaps that is a place to look. I have only glanced at them and have not got round to registering and sending a CV.
Personally I can't use offers (or "gigs" on Fiverr) because I need a client to come to me with a problem. I can't offer a generic solution for them to buy.
I don't consider the 14 day thing to be a major issue. I am nervous about PPH sitting on my money and want it safely in my bank account. Most of the time now there isn't enough to worry about but I had a reasonable project this week and now I'm now worried that PPH will suddenly go bust or find some other excuse to avoid paying me. They are not a company I would voluntarily allow to have 14 days credit. -
For me, I think the problem is that I had to find immediate alternative funding sources in April when the timeline suddenly changed to 14 days and I have never recovered from the high interest I had to pay. But I have a feeling that the people at the top just don't care. They probably laugh when freelancers say they are struggling with the new payment timeline.
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