Overall Impressions

Guru.com is by no doubt a huge site. By their own words it is “The world’s largest online marketplace for freelance talent”. I don’t know this it is the truth, but even if it is not, it’s pretty close to the truth.

Guru.com contains more than hundred job categories of all business areas. This is what makes it unique – all the sites I have seen are concentrated mostly on computer related jobs. Guru.com has categories on everything that can be done per freelance contract – from the well known computer stuff, to legal advice, business consulting, engineering, interior design and marketing.

I have never felt too comfortably on Guru.com however, most probably because of it’s a bit strange member’s area, bidding system and messaging. For me it is a bit weird, quite different from the control panels on the other sites and a bit confusing.

The free members on Guru.com have quite limited access, which has its advantages and disadvantages of course. You still can use the site as a free member – just like I have always done. But if you find the service good for you and like to work there a lot, better to upgrade your account.

Guru.com pays your earnings with Check, Bank wire or Paypal. Freelancers from India can also use Remit2India payment method. They charge 10% commissions for free members and 5% on the two paid account types.

Positives

- huge site with a lot of projects
- a lot of categories covering every kind of work
- excellent support and help
- limited competition because of the limited bids on free members
- overall good quality of the projects posted
- good protection against dishonest buyers

Negatives

- a bit confusing and not as easy to use as the other sites.
- high fees (10%) for free members
- not too many payment options
- absolutely no information about other’s bids

Additional Information

One of the things which frustrated me on Guru is that the other’s offers are completely hidden. You won’t understand the bids of the other competitors neither before, neither after the project is done. You won’t even know the number of bidders or the amount of average bid. Absolutely no guideline about the price you should offer.

I know this makes Guru.com closer to the reality. When you approach a client in the real world, usually you can’t ask them for the other offers or even if they have any. So it is a positive thing and forces you to give fair offer, instead of “outsmarting” the market.

On the other hand, especially if you are new in freelancing, you need some ways to learn – and Guru.com is not appropriate for that. Guru is excellent site for the experienced freelancers but a bit raw to the newbies.

If you create a Basic account (free), you will be allowed only 10 bids per 30 days. This option obviously is appropriate only if you just want to try Guru – or you diversify there, but it is not your main freelance site. If you want to use it more, you’ll have to pick a paid account type.

The first paid account type called “Guru” gives you 100 bids per 30 days, only 5% project fee and costs $30 – $100 per quarter depending on your profile category. This is the perfect account type if you want to work seriously on this site. The only advantage of paying more for the next level – “Guru Vendor” (costs $39 – $130 per quarter) is that you’ll have access to “vendor only” projects. And they are not that many.

Some do that better, some do it worse

Some charge you more, some less. Some will allow you to join free, while other will charge you a sign up fee. It is very important to choose 2-3 freelance sites where to put your efforts for getting projects. A bad decision may cost you money and for sure will cost you time and broken nerves.

In this article I’ll review my favorite freelance sites – each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. I’ll show you which they are and help you choose – but the final decision is yours.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Try to get freelance projects from at least two of these sites – this will help you diversify your income streams and will give you base for comparison.

On the other hand, don’t sign up in every freelance site you see on the Net. Being in too many of them, you will lose a lot of time checking them all and bidding everywhere. Most of the sites have minimum payouts and they’ll be even higher if you receive payments by check or bank wire. You won’t make much progress if you have $50 in each of 15 freelance sites and you can’t get them out because of the high bank fees. On the other hand, having let’s say $500 in each of 3 sites is much easier to maintain.

Now, onto the topic. Here are the best startup points for your freelance career:

Scriptlance Review: The easiest freelance site to start

RentACoder Review: Serious site for serious freelancers

GetAFreelancer Review: A Promissing Venture

Guru.com Review – Maybe the largest, maybe the strangest freelance site

Expect more reviews soon!

Overall impressions of Scriptlance

One of the most popular and most active freelance sites. Registration is free. There are hundreds of projects published every day and thousands of freelancers competing for them. You can withdraw your earnings via Check, Paypal, E-gold or Bank Wire. The support is overally good and there is a forum where you can receive other member’s feedback. The site is very easy to use. Your bids on ScriptLance are visible to the other members, unless the buyer has explicitly chosen otherwise.

Positives

- Very low commissions – only 5% of the project amount (minimal fee $5)
- Several withdrawal options including E-gold
- Good support and forum
- A lot of projects available every day
- Very user-friendly site
- Free registration, no monthly fees (unless for certified programmers)

Negatives

- Too much competition
- Often the projects are of low quality or not well paid
- Not very good protection against malicious buyers
- the commissions are taken when the project is accepted and before you get paid – thus you can have negative balance.

Additional information

There is a private message board on ScriptLance where you can communicate privately with the buyers. Many users use the boards to give private offers just like if they have placed bids. So you can’t entirely rely on the visible bids on the site to know the prices of your competitors.

Do not post contact information in your bids! You can be banned from the site for doing this. If you want to give a link to your portfolio, you must do it in the private message board.

Be careful not to end up with negative balance on ScriptLance. How is this possible? Well, they charge their fee at the time you accept to work on a project (after your bid is selected of course). So if this is your first project, or you have withdrawn all the funds from your account, now your account will be negative. You will have 30 days to pay the fee – either by getting paid from the buyer or by depositing money yourself. If you fail to do it you’ll get your account frozen until you do it. This is not so scary, because you don’t lose your account – you are just unable to place bids. But it is not a nice situation, so better avoid it.

ScriptLance does not automatically calculate commissions on additional payments made to your account – say bonuses or payments for extra work. But you must report them yourself – use the “contact us” link and then navigate to the appropriate form. If you don’t do it, you’ll be charged 10% instead of 5% on these extra payments.

If you conform to these small specialities in ScriptLance you will see that it is one of the best freelance sites available. And yes, you will be earning a good money thru them.

Overall impressions

A very professional and business-looking freelance website. Don’t get fooled by the site’s look, it is not “for the big fish” or something like that. It is just a good site available for everyone. The registration is free and this site also lists hundreds of new projects every day.

Rentacoder.com charges the highest commission fees among the sites I have used. You will have to pay 15% of your earnings. Well, in some occasions you will pay “only” 12.5% (this happens on one-to-one private projects). But the service and fraud protection that you get for this price are very good. Rentacoder.com sends your money via Check, Western Union or Paypal.

Positives

- very good protection against fraudiend buyers. Their escrow system makes you 100% secured
- excellent support, they will always listen to your needs
- excellent rating system
- cool top-coders competition giving you more exposure – once you become a “top coder” of course
- malicious rating protection – you can ask for arbitration if you are not happy with the rating you have received
- ability to publicly rebut a bad rating

Negatives

- very high commission fees – 15%
- the arbitrations are usually awarded to the buyers
- very strict on the timings – you can lose the payment if you don’t meet the deadline
- you have to submit annoying weekly reports on projects which are over $150

Additional information

The bidding on Rentacoder.com is hidden. This means that you can’t view the other coder’s bids and adjust yours accordingly. This can be good or bad, depending on how you see it.

Fortunately once the project is awarded to someone, the other’s bids are available to see. You can learn a lot by reading them and estimating why someone’s bid won and other’s bid lost. It’s not always the price which matters the most (in fact in less than 50% of the projects the lowest bid is chosen).

In RentACoder.com you don’t request a withdrawal from your account when you want. They send it on 1st or 15th each month only if it exceeds a limit, set by you. Make sure to set this limit high enough, so lower % of your money goes to bank or Western Union fees. If you use Paypal you don’t have to worry about this.

Try to get into the “top coders” list. It is not that hard – you need 3 projects completed, $500 or more earned, average rating 9 or more, and no failed projects. Being a “top coder” you get a “medal” attached to your profile and earn a lot more credibility.

Never ever allow to lose a project and receive a rating 3 or lower. This will throw you off the top coders ranking forever. If some job goes nowhere, try to arrange mutual agreement with the buyer so he gets his money back, but you don’t receive a bad rating.

Rentacoder.com has quite picky system and is good for self disciplined freelancers. If you are not in this category, better choose some of the other sites.

At the time I was looking to find freelance programming jobs I was using several very good websites and techniques which keep working today. My advice is not to approach all of them at once. Choose 2-3 and put some effort into winning a project. Work on them, gain some experience and try building good reputation. Maybe you won’t like some freelance website or some message board, but even then the experience will be of use. Don’t try to diversify your time between all of them – this way you won’t have a chance to present yourself good enough in any of the sites.

Freelance websites

These are marketplaces whose purpose is especially to help you find freelance jobs. Here are my top 4 choices:

Scriptlance is one of the best places to start on. There are really over 100 projects posted every day and most of them are freelance programming jobs. The bidding on Scriptlance is public, i.e. your bid will be visible to the others. This makes it excellent for you, because you can learn from others bids. Note that there is a private message board where you can communicate with the client.

The commissions which Scriplance takes are fairly low – only 5% of the project amount (minimum $5). They offer several payment options which makes them appropriate regardless of where you live – Check, Bank wire, Paypal or E-gold. The registration is free and you don’t have to pay anything up-front

GetAFreelancer is another super active freelance site with more than 100 projects posted per day. More than half of them are for programming. On this site you can also see the average bid yet on the page with project listing and the bidding is also public. The commissions they take is higher – 10% of the project amount (with minimum $5). Just like on Scriptlance nothing will have to be paid on the featured projects.

There is an option to be a Gold Member which costs $10 per month and provides you with some benefits, but the basic level is free. GetAFreelancer is a champion in providing methods of payment – they can issue your earnings thru PayPal, E-Gold, Bank Wire, Check, Moneybookers and Western Union.

RentACoder used to be my favorite and I still like it a lot, although their rules for freelancers are a bit too strict. You should definitely deliver the projects on time and communicate with the clients, otherwise you get heavy penalties (bad ratings etc) on your profile which can put the potential new buyers off.

There are a lot of categories, but again finding freelance programming jobs is the easiest among them. Its is also very active – not less than Scriptlance or GetAFreelancer and there are a lot of options to search and filter the bid requests. The bidding on this site is private, i.e. you won’t see other’s bid amounts before the winner is selected.

The registration and using the site is free. The commissions on RentACoder are the highest – 15% of the project amount, but once you sign up in the site you’ll understand what you pay for. A lot of educational articles, professional staff which is always ready to help you and excellent protection from unfair buyers – their escrow system perfectly protects you from not being paid.

RentACoder pays your earnings thru Check, Paypal or Western Union.

Guru is one of the largest freelance websites which includes categories for almost everything that you can think about. When I first visited it I found it a bit strange and really, you’ll need to spend some time reading until you get used to the interface. The site has a an excellent profile/resume builder which allows you really impress the potential buyers of your programming services.

There are free and paid accounts on Guru. As a free member you’ll have to pay 10% commissions and will have limited access to the projects and limited amounts of bids per month. Of course the paid members are not limited in this way and pay only 5% of their earnings. (there are actually 2 types of paid accounts offering different conditions).

The bids on Guru are hidden and you won’t see the other’s offers even after the project is over.

Message Boards

Some freelancers do very well in finding programming jobs thru message boards. I have rare used this method, but have some good impressions from the following boards:

Looking to hire section at Sitepoint.com has 2-3 requests for programming help per day. The competition between the providers is much lower, so your chances to get a job are pretty good.

On Help Wanted in Domain Names Forum you’ll also find 2-3 projects posted every day and in general the buyers are genuine and honest.

Basically the forums can’t be your main source for finding freelance jobs, but they are also a way to start or get additional business.

Overall Impressions

GetAFreelancer(GAF) is a bit newer than the mastodons Scriptlance and RentACoder, but it managed to take a large pie in the market very fast. The site is very nice and easy to use. You can see all projects at a glance, just like in Scriptlance (the layouts of both sites are similar). You will find more than 100 new projects posted every day.

GetAFreelancer takes higher commission – 10% of the project amount or $5 (whichever is higher). The Gold members pay NO commission fee though and you can be a Gold member very easy – just pay $12 per month. If you do a lot of work there, it is pretty small fee. There is a minimum bid amount of $20, which takes out the $5-per-project guys.

GetAFreelancer really takes care about your money and will allow you to withdraw in six ways – PayPal, E-Gold, Bank Wire, Check, Moneybookers and Western Union.

Positives

- Very easy to use, excellent navigation and explanations
- You can work without paying commission fees as a Gold member – for just $12 per month
- Very popular – a lot of new projects posted every day
- Many withdrawal options, including MoneyBookers and E-gold
- RSS feeds with the projects available
- $20 minimum bid – no cheap competitors who work for $5

Negatives

- Too much competition, just like in Scriptlance
- Higher fees unless you are Gold member
- Not very good protection against malicious buyers

Additional Information

GetAFreelancer just recently implemented some interesting new features. The free members are now allowed to place only 15 bids per month and Gold members – 150 bids per month. Don’t think this is bad. I think it is quite good. Are you serious about building a freelance career? I am sure you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this site.

Limiting the bids is good thing, because it limits the low quality bids and cheap workers. It limits your competition and increases the chances for your bid to win. Yes, you will have to be more careful when choosing a project to bid on, but this can be only positive for you. This way you will rarely end up winning a project which you can’t complete. And if 15 bids per month are not enough, for only $12 your limit will be raised to 150 bids monthly.

In general I like GetAFreelancer a lot and think that they will be one of the biggest players in the future.

I must say I haven’t had much own experience with GetACoder. When I first found it, I already was too busy and wasn’t looking for extra freelance work. I registered an account just to take a look around and did not like it too much.

The script looked similar to GetAFreelancer and Scriptlance, but seemed a bit more confusing and the forgotten password function was not working. There were not many projects either.

Returning to this site today after a couple of years I see some of the problems remain, but some things have improved a lot.

GetACoder Popularity

I rare hear freelancers talking about GetACoder so I thought it’s still not very active site. However, look at their browse projects page – there are about 50 new projects posted every day! Certainly this is less than the giants Scriptlance, GetAFreelancer, Guru and RentACoder, but it’s still pretty good.

Now look at the number of bids per project – very often they are less than 10. Looks like we have found a decent site with slightly less competition between the freelancers. That could be a golden mine for you.

Fees, commissions and conditions

The fees are quite high. They take 10% of the bid amount + $5 fixed fee on each project. This probably keeps many freelancers off. Premium members (who pay $8 per month) are free from the $5 fixed fee and have to pay “only” 10% of the project amount.

They take 5.9% + $0.45 fee if you choose to withdraw your funds by E-gold. For Paypal the withdrawals are free. Unfortunately there is no other withdrawal method, not even check! Another problem with the payments is that you can’t get out less than $100 – so if you work on small projects you may have to wait until you accumulate funds.

Positives

- Good amount of projects. Although it’s not as active as the biggest sites, GetACoder offers a lot of new projects every day.
- Less competition – there are less providers than on most of the other sites. Well, this is mostly because of the disadvantages of course.
- Premuim membership grants access some extras like HTML and logo templates, portfolio samples directory and fonts

Negatives

- Too high fees. They are still lower than the fees on RentACoder (except on the very small projects), but on RAC you get what you pay for. I am not sure why you have to pay so much on GAC.
- Only two withdrawal methods. That is really crazy. How can they not offer at least cheque or bank wire? Not everyone has Paypal or wants to use E-gold especially for 6% fee!
- Minimum withdrawal of $100. I don’t understand this as well. Why you cannot withdraw $10 – both Paypal and E-gold have no problem with small payments.

Other than what is said above, I noticed GetACode have the same freezing policy to accounts with negative balance like on Scriptlance (see my Scriptlance Review for more details).

I’ve seen various feedback about GAC on the Web – from “very good” to “horrible support”. Some of the feedback is outdated however – people who claim there are no contact details on the site are wrong – there are several phones and faxes on their “Contact Us” page.

I am not really sure if this site is for you, but if you look for some alternative of the most popular sites, GetACoder seems like one to consider.

None of the above.

The buyers definitely want to know about your experience, ratings and reviews and for sure they want to know your price. But none of this is the most important thing. There is something else, something which makes them choose you and no one else.

Ask Questions

Uh?! Simple as that? Well, it may not be as simple. Why ask questions at first place?

Asking questions shows that you are really interested in the project and that you understand the basics of it. It shows that you really care about your customer’s need and want to hear exactly what he or she wants.

This is what your potential customer is looking for – someone who actually cares for them. By asking questions about some specifics in the project you show your interest and care. Always try to ask a good question and at the same time show that you understand the other aspects of the project.

Ok, but you know, the winning bid has more characteristics than just asking questions.

Be Friendly

Providing freelance services is just a business like any other. But who said the business communication should be impersonal and dry? The Net business and especially the freelance websites are more informal environment. Don’t be dry, be friendly.

Start with “Hello”, “Hi there” and if possible address the client’s name – like “Hello James,”, “Hi Patrick”, “Dear Kate” etc. Avoid impersonal things like “Greetings” for example.

How to know the buyer’s name? Well, many of them sign themselves under the project description. If not, check their reviews. If the buyer is not new for that freelance marketplace, chances are that some of the previous reviewers may have addressed the buyer by name in the review (ex. “Bill is a great customer…”). Always spend the time to do that, it is well worth it!

I avoid appeals which create the feeling for standing below the buyer. I have never addressed them with “Dear sir” for example, but in some countries it is accepted as normal appeal, so you have to decide yourself on that.

Definitely stay away from too familiar openings like “Yo”, “Hya” or something like that – you may find it funny, but I have seen such bids.

Give a Quote

I know I said the price is not the most important, but it is probably the second of importance. I also know it is sometimes hard to give the exact price, especially if you have questions. And you must have questions

But all freelance sites allow you to change your bid at any time, until bidding is open. So try giving an approximate quote just so the buyer knows what to expect. Many freelance buyers ignore bids which don’t contain price information. So give one – better be safe than sorry.

Obviously most customers look for low prices, but don’t think that the lowest price is the best. If you underestimate your skills, what would you do with their project? Most serious buyers think that way.

Just give a fair quote. Certainly there are customers who will choose the lowest bidders, but do you really want to work for them? No, this is not for you. You are here to be a successful and well paid freelancer, not just to survive.

Give Suggestions and Ideas

Ok, ideas are not free, but I don’t mean to give them detailed plan of what to do. Just suggest the customer some way to achieve the goal, to improve the product, site or design they want created. This way you show not only your expertise, but that you are willing to make their product better.

For example many freelance buyers ask about sites with forums. You can always suggest to use some free open-source forum to reduce the cost and development time. Or if you are a designer, suggest them some usability features for their site.

Be Honest

Look, I am not your moral mentor. It’s not about moral. Being honest is the best business and persuasive tactic. If the client feels that you are lying them for something, forget doing business with him. People hate being lied.

On the other hand, giving honestly your position and sharing your honest opinion (in an appropriate way and voice) earns you trust immediately.

If you don’t know about some technology, be honest about that in the bid. If you don’t think you can meet the deadline, explain this in the bid. Just be honest.

In most cases this is all you need to win a bid. It’s not a magic, neither requires some great copyrighting skills. More than 90% of the freelancers don’t follow even one of these guidelines. Following them all together makes you stand out from 99% of the competition. The choice is yours.

The freelancer can live anywhere in the world. The good programmers and designers do not belong to a single nationality. However you can’t simply ignore each country economy and cultural specifics. Instead of that, better use them to achieve greater results.

If you are from India, these tips are for you.

1. Use Your Country Reputation

People know a lot about India. They know it’s a top IT outsourcing destination, they know that they could hire a good programmer for a fair price. Indians have reputation to be nice people and hard working professionals.

Use this at your favor, include India in your company name, freelancer’s profile or signature. Not everyone can understand this only by seeing your name. Just make sure that you mention being from India, but of course don’t think this alone can win you projects. You still need to provide good service.

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2. Search for Indian Freelance Work

There are sites on the Web dedicated especially for freelance work in India. Of course you can (and must) search for good projects worldwide, but why not check also the Indian sites? Working within your country will save you bank fees when you get payments and also will eliminate the problem with the hourly difference between you and the Western world.

There are also sites for worldwide buyers who want to search only for Indian freelancers. That’s another good option for you because there is less competition in such places.

Some sites that you can check are:

Freelance Jobs India – you can publish your profile there and wait the buyers to contact you or search projects

E-guru.in – a typical freelance site only for Indians. It’s not very active, but still worths checking.

For sure you’ll find more such marketplaces – you just need to use your favorite search engine.

3. Manage Your Daytime

Your main problem is that you live in the East and most of the well paying customers are from North America or Western Europe. This means that you time is ahead with 4 – 12 hours. Often when your customer wakes up, it’s time for you to go to bed. This is definitely an issue.

One thing you can do is to work in the night and sleep in the day, but it is not good for your health and happiness. What you need to do is to try to find such a work time which will allow you to catch some part of the day of your target customers. No one expects you to stay with them online all the time – finally, you are a freelancer, not an employee. But people want at least to get responses and updates to their mails relatively fast. So try to make sure that you can check and respond your mails at least once late in the evening or very early in the morning (which ever you prefer).

4. Build Your Personal Website

This advice is good for every freelancer, not only for Indians. But still you have some advantages – for most Western people India is an exotic destination and they find it interesting to know more about it and its people. A personal website with your picture and few words about you can win you the liking of the potential customers.

Of course, you need to find the balance – don’t go too personal for example talking about your childhood and giving your pics as a baby. Try to speak about your professional experience, provide your CV, pictures and say a little about your other interest and the city where you live. This will give nice sense of personality without going too much offtopic.

Don’t push your personal website in the face of your client. It’s not an important part of your portfolio. Just have the link to it somewhere or best is to provide the link to your CV which stays there. The customer can look at the other pages from the site if they want to.

5. Report Your Earnings

There is a thread on Scriptlance Forum, explaining well why you should do it. Don’t cheat and don’t take unnessecery risks. Just report your earnings and you will feel better.

Do not use Xoom.com, Western Union or Money Gram to transfer your money. Use legal ways like checks and bank wires. You can also use e-gold and anonymous debit cards, but that is both costy and illegal.

You can also use Paypal – which I want to elaborate a bit more.

6. Use Paypal

Paypal is the most popular method of making payments via Internet and in 90% of the cases it will be the most preferred method of payment for your customers. Recently Paypal expanded worldwide and now it’s available in almost any country. In many of them however the users can only send money and not receive.

But you are lucky, because you are from India. In India you can receive funds with Paypal and withdraw them via a check. There is still no domestic wire offered, but that may also happen some day. Additionally, you can always spend these Paypal funds to purchase things online.

Always make sure that you are able to accept Paypal and let your customers know that. It is a big advantage, especially considering how many freelancers from other countries can’t do it.

7. Outsource to Other Indians

Outsourcing is one of the best ways to grow your freelance business. One can do only that much and there is no use of attracting hundreds of clients if you can’t serve them.

Being in India you have so much easier way to hire other Indian programmers and designers to do the tasks that you can’t or don’t want to do. You can meet them live, you can speak cheaply by phone with them, you can pay them via local bank wires or in cash. It’s a big advantage to have easy access to other great professionals like you.

Before going any further, let me tell you I have had a good success in freelancing without using Elance as a service provider. I have done pretty well just with RentACoder and Scriptlance. So you don’t necessarily need to join Elance and spend money on their memberships. But as you’ll probably conclude from this review, you can hugely benefit of making this reasonable investment.

Overall Impressions

When talking about Guru as about one of the largest freelance sites, I meant mostly the huge amount of work categories it offers. The number of projects on Elance seems to be even more than Guru. For example at the time of writing this article there were 2,281 open projects with 970 in Website development category alone. Around 6,000 projects were posted in the last 15 days. There were 30,000 registered professionals at that time (the number of providers is much lower than on Guru). It’s a huge business.

The site looks different than the most popular sites like Scriptlance and GetAFreelancer. It may not be as easy to use, but is much more featured than them. The support is excellent and the overall level of the clients and providers is much higher.

Generally there is no free membership for freelancers in Elance. All membership options are paid.

Positives

• A huge marketplace. There is really work for everyone in Elance. If you have not had success in other sites, probably you will have it here. There are all kind of projects and there is a lot of them.
• Less competition. Let me elaborate a little bit on that. There are thousands of service providers on Elance, so there is a lot of competition just like anywhere else. However as you can see in their membership options page, the number of bids allowed is limited per account type. So the freelancers need to carefully think on which projects to bid and which projects to skip. This generally leads to less bids per project which means less actual competition.
• The most respected. Being in Elance already means you are a real professional. Most buyers rate the freelancers working on Elance higher than those on other sites. Just the fact that you pay for membership makes you look much more serious (and it is true).
• Higher prices. The project bids are overly higher on Elance than on any other freelance site. This means that you will be paid more for the same work.
• Some very big projects. Elance is the only freelance marketplace where you can often find projects for $25,000 or even $50,000 and above. Certainly this can happen in any other of the sites, but on Elance it is not an exception. Even real big companies bid on these projects.

Negatives

• High prices for membership. The cheapest Limited membership costs $11-$29 monthly, $22 – $59 quarterly or $59 – $199 annually depending on your category. If you want to be a Professional member you’ll have to pay $29 – $89 monthly, $69 – $169 quarterly or $139 – $339 annually. The Select membership costs $69 – $199 monthly, $149 – $459 quarterly or $349 – $1149 annually. On top of that you have to pay 6.75% to 8.75% commission on each project
• Not appropriate for beginners. Probably there are some freelances who start right away with Elance, but most of them already have some freelancing experience when joining. There are no projects for $5 just to take a review like on Scriptlance. It’s a serious business marketplace.
• High minimum bids. You can’t bid less than $50. If you have Select membership you can’t bid less than $300 – $500 on a project depending on the category. While this is very good on one side, on the other it’s limiting your competition abilities.
• The membership is limited per category. You can’t just take any project. It must match the category you have profile in. The membership fees have to be paid for each category you want to participate separately.

Additional Information

You can withdraw your funds from Elance thru a Bank wire only. The good thing is there is one free withdrawal allowed each month. For each additional withdrawal you have to pay $25 processing fee. If you are from USA you can withdraw your funds via ACH Transfer or Check.

In general Elance has a very serious business image and it’s a place where to expand your freelance career. If you are currently busy with freelance work but not getting paid enough, it is time to try Elance.

If you still have no experience at all in freelancing, better try some of the free sites like Scriptlance.

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