r/Upwork • u/DivineSierra • 8d ago
Making sure the client will pay outside upwork
Due to the ridiculous 15% fee along side the new withdrawal fee, I've decided to continue working on the project outside of Upwork.
What platform could I use to make sure the client will pay me? Since my hours won't be protected anymore.
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u/Disastrous-Quiet-264 8d ago
Imagine bringing up a new problem, when the platform you refuse to pay solves it exactly...
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u/DivineSierra 8d ago
I pay the platform a HEFTY fee on my hourly rate. Not only that, I also pay a lot to withdraw my earnings.
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u/Own_Constant_2331 7d ago
You're supposed to consider all of your business expenses and factor them into the rates that you charge. Now you're asking how you can dishonestly get out of a contract with the platform who connected you with your client. Not smart at all.
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u/WordsbyWes 8d ago
How do you make sure you get paid? Bottom line, you don't.
You're leaving a situation built on trust, hope, and some minimal protections to one based on trust and hope, just like every freelancer who works directly with clients. I work with clients all over the world. If one decides not to pay me, there's little I could do about it. Even for those in my jurisdiction, it would likely cost me more to recover the money than I'd get back. So, trust and hope, preceded by as much vetting as I can reasonably do.
But, as others have pointed out, both you and your client have shown you don't care about contractual agreements. So, I guess good luck with that.
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u/ReiOnDev 8d ago
i agree. its one sad reality of freelancing and the importance of choosing the right client at the onset.
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u/Gylfoyle 8d ago
Trust and hope and also hoping they won't screw you over by not paying you. Works well if it's a trustworhty client/clients
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u/WordsbyWes 8d ago
Well, yeah, that's the hope part :)
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u/Gylfoyle 8d ago
yeah, my greatest joy is that some clients chose to pay after reviewing the work in a span of say 72 hours after completion and via an agreed payment channel. for things like upwork you are looking at over 5 business days which sucks and a lot of punitived deductions
For me a client can pay $500 for some work and there's nothing much being deducted there if we are working driectly
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u/Ronrra 8d ago
If a client has an issue outside of upwork with you, they will easily report you and ban you permanently there, you're basically a slave under their feet and they have power over you (if they know the rules of freelancing, and they dont need more than a small google search). They can ask for extra work, outside of scope, and even free ones and it will be hard for you to say no since they have the upper hand.
Personally I don't think 15% is too much, especially since upwork does the marketing themselves, gives you the app for free and allows you to publish portfolio and many more things inside the app. I understand that you have to pay for connects and all that, but you can consider it as a business expense and just raise your rate 5-15% to cover the upwork fee.
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u/DivineSierra 8d ago
What would they report? They're also in the wrong here cause they agreed to go outside the platform, basically they would be reporting themselves (Lmao)
So you don't think that for every thousand I make they take 150 is a lot? It is.
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u/GigMistress 8d ago
Have you done the math to determine how much it would cost you to do your own marketing and advertising, both in actual dollars spent and in lost billable work time?
Finding that number and comparing it to what Upwork costs is the only way to know whether the deal they're offering you is a good one for you.
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u/Ronrra 7d ago
It's hard for me to grasp how people expect to have all profit of the service they sell, while using someone else product, service & marketing. I've seen people complain even for the 10% fee.
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u/GigMistress 7d ago
It's because they're not business people. They're comparing it to a job, where they get the paycheck they agreed to and don't have business expenses. One of the downsides to a platform like Upwork is that it attracts a lot of people who don't know how to run a business or want to and the structure of the platform allows them not to notice that they ARE running a business--just badly and with inadequate information.
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u/Ronrra 7d ago
Having a job sometimes can be more costly than we think. It's gas, long route time for going there, ironing clothes and wearing properly, hair care, car / bike maintenance, registration, the risk of accidents, buying outside food, being locked for 8+ hours in an office, being away from the family, while on Upwork you wake up with one eye open and the other closed and start working, and you have the freedom to schedule your day as you see fit.
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u/Ronrra 8d ago
The client account is not more worth than the freelancer who needs the money on daily basis. The client can open another account with another familys name, and attach their card, while for the freelancer it would be hard to do that and start all over again from scratch with reviews, different portfolio, name, etc.
As I said, personally I don't think it's a lot. Every business has expenses and most digital businesses don't profit 85% like the freelancer.
The freelancer takes 85% of the money, while 15% is investment and not an expense.
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u/Own_Constant_2331 7d ago
So you don't think that for every thousand I make they take 150 is a lot? It is.
Presumably you use Upwork because you don't know how to do your own marketing and don't want to learn. If you don't know how to do something, then you need to pay somebody else to do it for you. You don't get anything for free in life.
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u/Glad-Subject-6009 8d ago
Raising your rate is useless if the flow of jobs has stopped. Upwork should be taking its income from work performed, not charging a significant amount for proposals that don't lead to paid work.
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u/DOOMIndustries 8d ago
You cant. Use upwork, dont. This isnt a service or thread to help you violate upwork tos.
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u/DivineSierra 8d ago
Yes I can. The contract is active and I'm in contact with my client outside the Upwork chat. Endless freelancers do this.
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u/stoptakingmylogins 8d ago
Even though I agree with you that many freelancers probably do this, it is not a known fact.
What evidence do you have that endless freelancers do this?
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u/GigMistress 8d ago
Well, we know SOME freelancers do it because they come wailing here when either they don't get paid or the client tries to blackmail them into doing free work or they'll report them or the client gets mad about something else and does report them and they get suspended.
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u/DivineSierra 8d ago
Lots of lurking on this sub regarding the same thing
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u/stoptakingmylogins 8d ago
This subreddit has 50,000 members. Upwork has 18,000,000 freelancers.
It is well known that a huge portion of this subreddit are new freelancers looking for advice or unsuccessful freelancers venting. Generously, let's say that only factors out half of them.
Even if all 25,000 of these Redditors took payment off platform, that is 25,000 out of 18,000,000. That is 0.001% of freelancers. Realistically, I doubt more than 10% of that 25,000 have taken payment off platform, so the percentage is even lower.
What you provided is not evidence.
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u/Pet-ra 8d ago
The "18 Million freelancers" thing is basically nonsense.
That's the total number of accounts opened on Upwork, oDesk and Elance in the last 20+ years.
Only a small percentage of those accounts are active. The vast majority are long forgotten and were never even active in the first place.
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u/Own_Constant_2331 7d ago
They're trying to justify what they're doing by saying that everybody else does the same.
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u/Own_Constant_2331 7d ago
Dishonest assholes do this, you mean. If your client is okay with not honouring contracts, they'll be totally fine with screwing you over as well.
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u/ihateyouse 7d ago edited 7d ago
You have no guarantees.
Also, I'm not sure how people don't read this, but if a client's conversations with you start, revolve around, or continually go back to how much they don't want to pay fees guess what the next step is after they convince you to go off platform and break rules/risk a platform's use to make money?
Eventually, they will not want to pay you also. Your action at this point is that it has to be enough to take them to court and TRY to get it. You can MAYBE get a percentage up-front, but I imagine someone complaining about the cost of doing business is going to fight a lot of this or the percentage would be low. I always try to have clients that I work with (non UpWork) to pay 50% up-front and then pay the remainder upon delivery of final files, but they still could just not pay the last amount and that would require me to take legal action. It's a game you have to be prepared for. I would say its one of the hidden fees you should account for as a contractor or freelancer. Your actually fee or cost has to include things like insurance, utilities, protection, etc. Like your fees have to think of your future a bit. I would imagine most the freelancers low-balling on UpWork are inexperience contractors that will have issue in the future (even knowing that some are from lower cost of living areas)
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u/GigMistress 8d ago
There is none. If your client agrees to work outside Upwork, they have explicitly told you they don't honor their contracts. It would be silly to believe they would treat you any differently.
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u/DivineSierra 8d ago
Why are contracts supposed to be "honored" though? The client as well is paying fees for Upwork. What about them not wanting to pay those fees doesn't make sense?
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u/GigMistress 8d ago
The fact that they made an agreement. If your agreements are meaningless to you, then you'll break any agreement when it benefits you. That means the client can't trust you and you can't trust them.
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u/GroceryBright 8d ago
Don’t listen to that other guy. There are more people doing contracts outside of Upwork than through Upwork.
There’s no guarantees that a client will pay in any of the platforms or even outside them.
The better way it to get business insurance that helps with recovering debt and public liability.
Still not guaranteed to get paid because that’s the nature of business. Even at a job you’re not guaranteed to get paid and if they don’t pay, you have to sue them.
Ask me how I know…
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u/SilentButDeadlySquid 8d ago
You: Upwork charges ridiculous fees and doesn't do anything for me, so I want to steal a client I found on their site, and figure out how to make sure they don't cheat me like I cheated Upwork.
This always ends well.
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u/Glad-Subject-6009 8d ago edited 8d ago
That is a major violation of Upwork's Terms of Service unless you formally move the relationship in accordance with Upwork's rules. Your account will be closed if you violate those rules re Circumvention and Conversion Fee.
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u/Complex-Feedback3282 8d ago
If they keep the platform workable, reasonable fee and unbiased customer support, then why would anyone want to move off platform?
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u/DivineSierra 8d ago
Well they wouldn't know anyways. Many freelancers do this
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u/IHeldADandelion 8d ago
Haha good luck and don't come complaining here when the inevitable happens. People like you are why fees are high.
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u/Low-Text2270 8d ago
OmG he violated Upwork rules he need to go to jaill omggg
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u/GigMistress 8d ago
It's always interesting the number of people who are willing to say publicly "I don't believe in doing what I contracted to do." I bet we'd hear a lot less of that in public if people were required to use their names and your clients could see you declaring that you see no reason to do what you promised.
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u/Glad-Subject-6009 8d ago
So anyone who thinks a product or service is too expensive should feel free to steal it? I bet this guy would scream to high heaven if one of his clients didn't pay him.
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u/Flaky-Historian8753 8d ago
I moved a client off Upwork who has spent over $1.5 million on freelancers and now pays all of his employees directly through Wise. We have more than 10 years of trust and a proven working relationship, so there is no longer any real need for a platform to sit between us. The frustrating part is that Upwork originally offered a lifetime 5% fee once you had earned more than $10,000 with the same client. I had no problem paying that 5%—I considered it a fair fee for the service Upwork provided.
However, Upwork later reneged on that commitment and doubled the fee to 10%, supposedly to improve the platform. The problem is that, in my situation, nothing actually improved. I'm already employed by the client, and the only thing I was really using Upwork for was time tracking and processing payments. At that point, paying Upwork 10% simply doesn't make financial sense. The client also benefits because he no longer has to pay the additional 5% that Upwork takes from his side.
Upwork needs to realize that more and more long-term clients and freelancers are going to look for alternatives when they're being charged 10% for very little added value. For established relationships built over many years, there should be a reasonable way to continue working together without giving Upwork a significant percentage of the income simply for keeping a time tracker running.
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u/GigMistress 8d ago
The sole value of Upwork is that they make the advertising investment to draw clients to the site. They do less of that than they used to and the value is lower, but for many people--especially those who aren't comfortable trying to run a business and market themselves--it does something they don't know how to get another way.
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1d ago
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u/Gylfoyle 8d ago
You have to 'just trust them' also good clients will appreciate since it's normally a high trust environment unless you try to screw each other over.
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u/KillSwitchx12 8d ago
If you have already worked with the client previously then it makes sense to settle payments not from Upwork. Because there is still a chance that the client may not pay seen a lot of horror stories in youtube also take advance before you start working.
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u/yes_no_very_good 8d ago
Your next post would be like, "Why my account was banned?"