Revisiting Freelancer.com

ptilsen

Today, I decided to take another look at Freelancer.com, which I first looked at about a year ago when someone mentioned it in a thread about Workmarket. I had previously created an account, but essentially gave up on the site after coming to the conclusion it would be a significant up-front time investment for very little reward. There weren't that many projects related to infrastructure, and the budgets ridiculously low.

I found Freelancer has restructured a bit, with more intuitive categorization of projects and definitely more projects in all areas, especially those relevant to my interests. Not only are there more general infrastructure projects, but I'm started to get more interested in doing small programming and scripting projects on the side to make up for the limitations of what my day job needs.

Unfortunately, Freelancer has apparently added a certification system, wherein you pay $5 to take a certification test in a given area. There were quite a few for tech, though only a handful that would interest me or most TE members. There's even one for English fluency. While $5 doesn't break the bank, I'm extremely dissuaded at this point. I'm supposed to spend $30 or $40 on tests to show relatively basic skill just to even be allowed to bid on projects which by and large seem to still have pretty limited budgets. Just looking at a sample of 20 projects, maybe three were both interesting and enough money to even think about.

Has anyone here actually done a project on Freelancer, or done them with some frequency, for that matter? The concept is intriguing to me and my desire to write non-trivial programs and scripts and fix problems for money is strong, but the whole thing strikes me as not worth the effort.

Nemowolf

I had the same idea and the same results. Weeding through the hundreds of seemingly bogus/trap projects is just way too time consuming. While we take time and money to register and show we are skilled for a project, i don't think it takes anything more than a couple of bucks to post and promote some scam listing for make money at home get rich schemes.

Makes me think that cruising around a neighborhood on garbage day and emptying recycle bins is a more lucrative source of money.

skinsFan202

I've had much better luck with workmarket.com

ptilsen

I feel the same way about Workmarket, for the most part. I'm on WM and get jobs sent to me. They're usually absurdly cheap, $20/hr or $60 flat fee. I literally will not even show up somewhere for $60. I understand I'm getting the worst of the worst because I've put basically no effort into it, but I just haven't seen that it's that lucrative for someone who has a day job. I've also seen that Workmarket is more geared towards technician sort of work, if you will. Install a switch, fix a computer or printer, stuff like that. Are companies on Workmarket contracting out Exchange migrations or complex automation scripts? If they are, I haven't seen it. Freelancer interested me because I could go search and cherry pick interesting projects, but the money seems just as bad as Workmarket and effort required just as high.

coty24

Have you tried www.odesk.com?

ptilsen

No, I will have to give it a look. Thanks. Any word on how it stacks up to freelancer and WM? Lots of frivolous testing you have to spend money on?