Upwork

I'm not even going to waste time writing a long damn review.

Just don't start. It's a rat race and I'm sure Upwork creates fake job applications so you waste money buying connects which you don't get for free. You have to spend more and more and get less and less.

But the cherry on the cake is the 15% set fee, from 10 to 15. So even if you earn money, it all goes to them.

These people at Imark are liars, manipulators but also Criminals that will abuse your site for their own financial gain. They never deliver on what is promised, lie to you to keep the contract going. No improvement at all.

2 months after ending our agreement a worker from Imark (yes this is a company, not a freelancer), logged into my wordpress account with the details i had given him previously and changed payment gateways to his personal accounts and robbed me of 1200$. Absolute disgrace how upwork allows these scamming indians on here, this is just 1 out of hundred on the site, this place has lost its credibility completely. Do not work with these people under any circumstance, I am filling a report to the Indian authorities against them

I strongly recommend not using upwork, since they wouldnt help me at all after contacting them about IMark not even providing the services paid for.

After 2 years in Upwork and all the hustle, I earned more than 15k working in 8 jobs, My recent client was not happy that I quite and end the contract. I quite because it was end of my contract day so I didn't want to send new contract or accept his new one because of unfair amount of work/pay and general behavior toward me in his team so he went and gave me 3 star review with words like "untrustworthy, worst, not committed etc".

I politely asked him to revise the review and I even offered refund or free hour, he did removed those strong words but the review stayed the same. I can prove that I worked for that client more than agreed time and quality that he expected but that's not the problem. I had 400 Connects and spend it wisely over the past two month to get my next client and guess what no one is even viewing my proposal because of 65% JSS.

Upwork is refusing to delete any reviews which means if anyone spread the false information you are in trouble. I am not charging any more Connects in the platform, I gave 20% of my income to Upwork for not backing me up when its needed.
This is not fair if you are freelancer, I spend god knows how much time on the platform to be better, write better proposal and add valuable certificate like AWS/Terraform/LPIC to my account. So I decided to delete my account and move on.

As a new business client, I am profoundly disappointed with my experience on Upwork and cannot currently recommend the platform. My attempt to find qualified freelancers for my company was severely hampered by a series of issues and an inadequate support process.
Initially, two job posts I created – one of which was a paid premium post – were removed without any prior warning or plausible explanation. What was particularly frustrating is that a highly promising candidate had already been identified for one of the posts, and an offer had been extended. Due to the job post's removal, the system incorrectly marked this offer as "withdrawn by client," leading to a significant loss of trust with the candidate, who ultimately decided to discontinue a potential collaboration.
For several days, Upwork support was unable to provide a clear and understandable reason for the removal of my job posts. The explanations given were vague, contradictory (it was first stated one post was removed due to being in German, which did not explain the removal of a parallel, correctly English-language post), and ultimately unsatisfactory. An ID verification, requested only after the posts were removed and which I completed immediately, did not resolve the situation or lead to the reinstatement of the posts.
This lack of transparency, the absence of proactive communication, and the inability to resolve issues promptly and comprehensibly make Upwork an unpredictable risk for serious business clients who rely on a dependable recruitment platform. The consequences for my company have been wasted time, lost money (for the premium posting, for which I expect a refund), and the loss of a potentially valuable freelancer.
The underlying system flaws or moderation processes that lead to such seemingly arbitrary actions urgently need to be overhauled. Until then, I can only advise against using this service.

Dumbest website I have possibly seen on the internet. I cam back after 2 years when I tried already finding a freelancer there and quickly noticed again why 2 years ago I already immediately quit there. You cannot do anything on there. Everything is over convoluted and overcomplicated. Just finding and messaging someone can take days. If you want an extra full time job with no pay use upwork. That is literally how time consuming it is to create a simple profile or find any freelancer or connect with some one. Upwork should be out of business already. Also you need to do 100 times your KYC just to find a Freenlancer, as its super buggy and doesn't work and yes they have no support team. They want your phone, passport, work, certificates your whole life basically only so you can go look for Freelancers!?? And then once you signed up for 5 hours then you cannot message anyone anyway. Support team? No Only a bot that is not even AI. It's very bad, people should sue them for the amount of time stealing they actually do. Upwork is a negative to the global economy overall.

Upwork could be a great platform. We spent more than 200.000 Dollars so far with them.

But since about 1 year they started to get paranoid and have very bad algorithms to prevent getting in touch with chat or similar.

The problem: Its far away from working properly: Its blocking every 2nd message only when I want to give the freelancer the task to connect our facebook with a tool. "facebook" is triggering the alert that I want to get in contact directly and overpass upwork.

Its a mess!

Customer support is awful. Do NOT waste your time freelancing here.

Terrible platform. They make you pay for "connects" in order to bid for jobs, the issue is they never work. Unless you already have an account that has dozens of reviews and tons of traction you will NOT get hired.

I even offered my services for free just to get more reviews and the bids I spent money on didnt even get looked at.

This platform is a complete scam, don't waste your money.

My 9 years old Upwork account was recently suspended during the verification of my company with an accusation of submitting "falsified information." This is completely false — all documents I submitted, including the company incorporation certificate, were official and verifiable via the Indian Government's MCA portal.

Despite raising multiple support tickets (51843242, 51861640, 51861323) and providing valid proof, Upwork continues to mark my requests as "resolved" without any meaningful explanation or action. I’ve received no opportunity to clarify or defend myself, and there has been no proper review of the documents I submitted.

Upwork has been a key platform in my freelance career, and this unjustified suspension is both unprofessional and damaging. The lack of transparency, accountability, and fair support is extremely disappointing.

I urge the Upwork team to take ownership, conduct a proper review, and treat freelancers with the respect and fairness they deserve.

You pay money for credits then pay in credits to apply for jobs. Rule #1 don’t pay for an opportunity for work. 9/10 you don’t hear back about the jobs you apply for. If you forget about your subscription they auto renew you. $19.99 for a service you aren’t going to use. Now the first sign of a struggling Servuce is when they deny giving a refund for services unused. Stream labs gives a refund if you don’t use them. Myfundedfutures.com gives a refund. Captions.com. And Chatgpt, also give refunds. There are plenty of businesses that give refunds the only reason you don’t is because they have a struggling income stream. And a high dissatisfaction turnover month to month. Let’s say if more than half the people who sign up are dissatisfied and want to cancel their memberships That would mean every month they would have to give back more than half the money they made and it would probably make it hard to hold reserves. Now canceling my membership is my responsibility I get that. But writing code to auto renew without the option to just be month to month isn’t a choice I get to make except to do it or not. It’s still a choice that is started on the companies part. But let’s focus on the real issue. Why are there so many dissatisfied members that this policy is put I place? Because they aren’t getting the results the website is promoting. Every offer for work only accepts 10% or less of the amount of people who apply. You pay money yo get credits. You spend credits to apply for jobs. Not only that. They jobs want you to work to submit an application. Like producing said work to submit with your application. This takes time and money for each job you apply for only to not even hear back. It’s not setup in your favor. It’s a 90% or greater fail rate. Along with the time spent and money spent it’s a double negative to your time and money. You are literally working against yourself in the aspect of making money. It takes time to make money. It cost money to apply for jobs. You are spending twice for an opportunity that you might not even get an update about. You are also constantly searching for jobs this is more time. You also pay a membership for the credits that auto renew. Nothing about this setup is set up in your favor. Sure if you get the job and have been getting jobs and have a good rating. But not if you are new. Sure some people get paid but not 90%. It sounds like I’m running in circles but I’m just covering it in-depth to make sure you follow the thought process. If you need money and time is of the essence and you don’t have money sitting in the bank don’t come here. Go find a real job this is t the answer. This system isn’t setup to help you it setup to take your money and hold you captive until you realize it’s not made for you. And hope that you will forget about your membership or auto renew. As that’s the only reason a company would make sure every member only had the option for an auto renewal. To steal your money and not give you an option to get it back due to lack of remembering. Sure that’s your fault. But it’s also the companies fault for not being an honest business where they customer is always right. At the end of the day if you ran an honest business and your customers were satisfied you wouldn’t have to autorenew and deny refunds.

Absolutely terrible, cant even complete my sign up due to the hassle, you feel like you are a thief that is trying to steal from them. dont recommend using it.

We are a registered French company and long-time Upwork client (8 years on the platform) who hired a freelancer, Andreas Karl Morh, for a financial modeling project. Unfortunately, the experience exposed deep flaws in Upwork’s client protection systems.

Despite the freelancer:

- Submitting no deliverables after billing us for $470
- Refusing to provide any alignment or proof of work when we requested it
- Triggering a contract pause and dispute filing on our end
- Logging off-scope and irrelevant work
- Making inappropriate and discriminatory remarks during recorded Zoom calls (which we shared with Upwork)
- And requesting confidential company data (IRS documents, incorporation status) with no contractual justification

Upwork refused to issue a proper refund. Instead, they refunded only $10, citing technicalities in the Work Diary system while ignoring multiple violations of their Terms of Service and Professional Conduct Guidelines.

We requested arbitration, hoping for a fair third-party review. Instead, Sara from the Upwork Mediation Team informed us that no arbitration is available for hourly contracts, leaving us with no recourse despite extensive evidence.

We submitted a full case file, including:

- Screenshots from Upwork’s own systems

- Recorded call transcripts

- Documented policy violations

- A legal brief prepared by counsel

The freelancer submitted no deliverables, no scope-aligned work, and no justification. Yet the mediation team simply pushed for “compromise” instead of enforcing Upwork’s rules.

We have now filed a data protection complaint with French authorities, as the freelancer’s conduct may also constitute a breach of EU GDPR.

Upwork claims to be a platform for professionals. But if clients can be charged for work never delivered, and if clear misconduct is overlooked, it is not a safe place to do business.

We urge Upwork’s Trust & Safety and Legal teams to address this case properly. Until then, we cannot recommend Upwork to any company that values professionalism, privacy, or fair treatment.

If others have faced similar issues, please share your experience.

I have been using Upwork as a freelancer for about a year. I only landed 3 very short two-hour missions, which went well, but overall the experience has been disappointing.
The system of having to pay to apply and boost our application is frustrating, especially since it never worked for me. It’s extremely competitive, and my applications never get seen. It feels like a waste of both money and time.
I have also never seen expert-level roles offered at such low rates. Some of these high-level projects would be paid much more fairly on other platforms.
On top of that, Upwork recently increased their commission fee by 50% without providing any real added value or improved service. That’s a deal breaker for me.

Please read carefully. I’m writing to share my experience with Arpa Chatterjee and Digital Web Infotech. I was disappointed to find out he’s incompetent and demanding money. He’s not friendly and I don’t recommend hiring him. I’ve heard he’s a scammer who will try to steal your money.

I have had frustrations with logging-in with Upwork in the past, but I'm pretty happy with this platform now. I have an illustrator that is inexpensive but good. I have used him for a few years now for the occasional times I need illustrations. The Upwork fee seems fair to me, but I'm not sure what my illustrator is charged.

03-05-2025 15:48 - Berichten en oproepen worden end-to-end versleuteld. Alleen mensen in deze chat kunnen ze lezen, beluisteren of delen. Meer informatie.
03-05-2025 15:49 - Silke Stolk: Wie is dit?!
03-05-2025 15:49 - Weet Ik Veel: Hallo! Ik ben de Recruitment Manager (UpWork) en ik neem contact met je op omdat ik goed nieuws voor je heb. Mag ik een paar minuten van je tijd?
03-05-2025 15:55 - Silke Stolk: Nee hoor, bedankt.

Op TrustPilot is UpWork ontzettend slecht beoordeeld. Dat geeft geen vertrouwen. Verder werd ik uit het niets gebeld, er is nooit enig contact aan vooraf gegaan, er is wel gebeld maar geen voicemail ingesproken en dan krijg ik een gestandaardiseerd bericht waar ik niet op zit te wachten.

Je mag mijn telefoonnummer gewoon verwijderen. Alvast bedankt en nog een fijne dag gewenst!
03-05-2025 15:55 - Weet Ik Veel: Bedankt voor je reactie. Ons bedrijf werkt samen met Tik Tok en is bereid te betalen om het aantal likes te vergroten, dus ons bedrijf moet veel medewerkers werven en jij kunt betaald krijgen om hun likes op de Tik Tok-app te vergroten.
03-05-2025 15:55 - Weet Ik Veel: De job is heel simpel, je liket gewoon TikTok video's en stuurt een screenshot, dan krijg je 10 euro betaald Je kunt minimaal 60 euro en 500 euro per dag verdienen. Heb je interesse om met ons te werken?
03-05-2025 15:56 - Silke Stolk: Ik heb geen TikTok!
03-05-2025 15:56 - Silke Stolk: Wil ik ook niet.
03-05-2025 15:56 - Weet Ik Veel: Als je TikTok niet hebt, klik dan op de link die ik je gaf, maak een screenshot en stuur deze naar mij. Ik zal je dan betalen.
03-05-2025 15:56 - Silke Stolk: Nee.
03-05-2025 15:56 - Silke Stolk: Verwijder mijn nummer. Bedankt.
03-05-2025 15:57 - Weet Ik Veel: Dit is een parttime baan die je andere werk niet in de weg zit. De baan is simpel, je liket gewoon TIKTOK video's en stuurt screenshots om geld te verdienen. We betalen 10 euro per baan en je kunt tot 60-500 euro per dag verdienen door je gratis video te liken, neem op tijd contact met me op als je geïnteresseerd bent!

Vre-se-lijk! Gewoon een robot die je lastig valt. Eerst bellen ze en wanneer je dan appt om te kijken wie het is, is er AI gegenereerde onzin die als reactie op je berichten komt. Mijn nummer gaat natuurlijk niet verwijderd worden, dus bij deze is het nummer geblokkeerd.

Upwork is the best platform for freelancers

Since today, the fees for freelancers went from 10 to 15 % even though there are already poorly paid, it is a shame Upwork!

Absolute ridiculous platform.
"talent" is subpar most of the time, their prices are often unjustifiably high, and when you ask a potential candidate how they'd like to be paid (as it's your first time using the platform) they block your account even though you decided to pay via upwork... absolutely insane way to run a business. Will never recommend or use them again. Save your sanity and find quality candidates via onlinejobs.ph or fiver

They make you buy connects to bid on "jobs" on their website. Only half of the jobs posted are fake, so you are paying to bid on jobs that go to no one. On rare occasions, someone might actually look at your proposal, but not worth the risk. No support what-so-ever. I finally wised up and realized the whole thing is a scam.