The Freelance Platform: Does It Deliver? My Verdict After a Month with a Paid Business Account

I'd been thinking about writing this review for a month now, ever since I signed up here, and now I finally have something to share.

To my surprise, there aren't many reviews on Freelance, so I'm not even sure if anyone will bother reading this. But when I paid for the business activation (yeah, I know), I thought to myself, 'If I don't make a dime, at least I'll write a review.' A good excuse, if you ask me.

A little backstory: since I've been working for myself for a few years, my client base got wiped out when I moved to a new city in the fall, and rebuilding it will take time. I have another business on the side, but it doesn't take up all my free time, so I decided to try freelancing remotely. So, to make a long story short, I'm here to make some extra money, just like most people.

The first thing that caught my attention when I logged in was the 'Faces of Honor' section. There are all these Masha's and Vasya's who are gurus in their fields and offer their services. This is a paid feature. I'm about to blow your mind - the price tag ranges from 3 to 12 thousand rubles for two weeks. Is it worth it?

I didn't plan on getting myself involved with it, but I did some research in my free time to give you the lowdown.

I won't go into details about registration, but if you've ever used the internet, you'll figure it out.

If you're used to working on other platforms, you might be surprised that they don't ask for your payment details. No requests for bank account numbers or cards, and no information on where you can withdraw your money either. Who can guess why?

I won't spoil the surprise just yet - I'll tell you later.

In a nutshell, you fill out your profile, add some examples of your work, and get your profile in order (all pretty straightforward). Then, you click the 'Find Work' button (I haven't used any other features, to be honest), check the boxes for the areas you're good at, and you're presented with a list of active projects where clients are looking for freelancers.

If something catches your eye, you can submit a proposal. The response form is pretty flexible, so it's up to you.

Some clients list a price they're willing to pay, while others ask you to quote your price. But even in the first case, you can always respond and say something like, 'Dude, are you kidding me? That's three times the price!'

And seriously, it's happened before. When a client posts a job with three pages of requirements and a price that's peanuts, I'll respond with a realistic price. I know I won't get the job, but it's about principle - to bring the client back down to earth. I once had a job that looked good on paper, but the requirements and deadlines were unrealistic. I did some math and came up with 25 hours and 10 minutes. That's exactly how many hours I'd have to spend working on it to meet the client's requirements and deadlines. I figured I didn't have that kind of time, so I passed on it.

When it comes to this task, I think it's reasonable to factor in the extra cost - after all, it requires more work. Freelancers can't possibly work 25 hours a day for four days straight, right?

A free tip: Be realistic when evaluating a job, or you might be in for a surprise.

These lists of tasks on the site are just a chance to find work - it all depends on the offers and the quality of your competitors.

But that's not all. Many job postings in the feed will have a note at the end that looks like this.

When you try to open it, the system will tell you that you don't have access to the page because you don't have a business account.

Want to get more details and leave a comment? PAY UP!

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You'll need to pay the platform itself. The cheapest business account tariff is 590 rubles for a month.

Yes, for those who are skimming my text. To be able to leave comments on some job postings (or most of them, actually), you need to pay the site 590 rubles first. I paid, if that's any consolation. Fighting over it isn't worth it If you don't want to pay, just choose the jobs that are available to everyone and write there.

But can you really earn a living? - you ask.

I'd say, in theory, yes. It all comes down to your experience, the price of your services, competition, and how actively you're bidding. And, of course, how much you can earn is a whole different story. In my niche, 70% of freelancers work for the same price as I do, and their quality and experience are on par with mine. And, as a newcomer on the site with no reviews, I'm not exactly the most attractive option. Maybe someone considers this.

Some job postings ask you to complete a test task. Unpaid. I do it, hoping that the client will like my work and give me the job. So far, I've done about eight of these free tests, just to get some samples for my portfolio and get some experience. Sometimes these tests are pretty straightforward, but once I had a client ask me to complete a test that was actually quite demanding. He promised to pay, but then I never heard from him again. Maybe I should have specified my payment details in the contract - 'send payment to my wallet, since you promised.' The task wasn't that hard, but I spent almost 50 minutes working on it. And to make matters worse, he asked me to complete it by today. Anyway, that's a tangent. But, in my niche, test tasks are a common occurrence.

I got my first job on this platform the next day. I guess it was just luck I had priced my services slightly lower than my competitors, and suddenly I saw the notification that I'd been chosen as the executor. Like I said, in my niche, 70% of freelancers work for the same price as I do. Choose your battles - or don't.

I got my order, they dropped the materials, and I'm trying to figure out how the payment will work... I already mentioned at the beginning that the website doesn't have anything about money, payout, and all that.

The payment for the work will happen directly through any convenient method. Give the client a card - it'll be a card, agree to use Yandex Wallet - they'll transfer it there. It's up to you, the website doesn't care. You complete the order, send the work to the client, and they accept it - that's it.

- Stop! You'll say. - What if they don't pay? The website doesn't guarantee anything, right?

The risk is a noble endeavor, friends)

No, seriously, the website has something called a 'safe deal' That's when the amount for the work is reserved on a neutral account and transferred to the performer at the end of the task... But!

Read on

This calculation is only possible with a bank card issued in Russia.

And they'll likely take 100 rubles in commission

Math

If you took an order for 500 rubles (the minimum amount for such a deal), you'll get 400. So, 100 rubles will be taken from you.

If the deal is worth 2000 rubles, the commission will be 120 rubles.

So, if you're doing small orders up to 800-1000 rubles, it's not worth connecting this deal at all. Most of my orders are like that, and I haven't gotten any bigger ones all month.

In general, it's up to you. The commission is taken from you, not the client.

It's hard to talk about how much you can earn. It depends on your profile/rates and what kind of order you get. Maybe you'll snag something exclusive and make 20,000 rubles. I saw that on the platform, people were even looking for someone living in Nizhny Tagil to take a photo of some object or building for 1,000 rubles. And who knows, maybe you live just a five-minute walk away.

I often responded to offers, sending 2-4 responses per day to the orders that fit my experience. But I just wasn't chosen.

In general, it's like a regular job: you see a vacancy, send your resume, and wait to see what happens. It's the same here. I responded, and then it was up to chance. Once, a client sent me a comment asking how to contact me. I replied, but they never got back to me. Maybe that's just how it was meant to be)

Now, my paid account is about to expire, but I'll still log in to see what's new and where I can offer my services.

So, what do we have in the end?

1. Freelance.ru is a really popular platform, with plenty of legal and physical entities. Everyone knows about it. My husband, who's never used any of these platforms as a client or performer, knows about this one. There's always work here, in principle. And it's usually at a decent price. And sometimes not so decent There's work for specialists in various fields, as well as for those without special skills (writing a review, typing text, etc.).

2. To be honest, I didn't get too excited about the free account. It's pretty bare-bones – you can't even see other users' avatars, and the profile looks pretty rough. There's no sorting in the portfolio, and it's hard to tell if the person hasn't uploaded any work or if they're just not serious about their account. I was like that myself for a bit, thinking people should at least try to make their profiles look decent. But it turns out that's not an option for free users. I get why people would be put off by paying 600 rubles a month just to be able to respond to job offers – it feels like a scam. I read a book in school about a guy in America in the early 20th century who had to pay agencies just to get addresses of companies that needed workers. It's basically the same thing here. I ended up saving my 600 rubles and even making a profit, but...

3. Getting a job is tough, to say the least. There are a lot of strong competitors, so you either have to lower your price... or just rely on luck or find some way to make your application stand out. I don't know, it's hard to figure out. I've been lucky a few times because I have an IP, which lets me issue documents to clients, but that's not always the case.

I'd give the site a mediocre score. I'd still recommend it, though, because it's up to you to decide whether the experience is worth it or not.