As you all already know the situation going on in Upwork where you spend tons of hard earned money on connects only to get ghosted by clients , fake jobs and so called availability badge ...on the other side upwork keeps making money out of freelancers situation

Its time we get united and boycott buying more new connects for at least some months this sub has 39k freelancers if only 15k freelancers start a chain of doing it we can still make a big change or at least put a pressure on Upwork in doing changes which are beneficial for freelancers ...they are exploiting Thier connect feature to earn big profit and in return freelancers get nothing the only solution or way to make them focus on our problems is by boycotting new connect buying which is one of the biggest revenue generater for upwork and that is in our HANDS !

START TODAY ! IT'S IN YOUR HANDS

LIKE , REPOST , COMMENT on this so it reaches more freelancers and to show support or tell you are in !

I’ve never seen an Upwork client with this much spent before. Just applied to one of their jobs and noticed $37M total spent, 3,567 hires, and almost 7 million hours billed.

They’ve been on the platform since 2010, but that still seems wild. Has anyone here worked with a client like this?

logo.rar

I came across an Upwork job posting that required 20 Connects just to apply.

176 freelancers had already applied.

Let's do the math.

176 applications × 20 Connects = 3,520 Connects.

At $0.15 per Connect, that's $528 worth of Connects just from applications.

But it gets even more interesting.

Look at the four freelancers bidding to boost their proposals:

• First freelancer: 400 Connects ($60)
• Second freelancer: 202 Connects ($30.30)
• Third freelancer: 205 Connects ($30.75)
• Fourth freelancer: 201 Connects ($30.15)

That's another 1,008 Connects, worth $151.20.

Total: $679.20 worth of Connects on ONE job post, assuming those four boosted bids are ultimately charged.

And guess what?

The client hasn't hired a single freelancer yet.

t's not even a fixed-price project with a guaranteed budget. It's an hourly job.

And the client's hiring rate? Just 33%.

So freelancers are spending real money competing for a job where the client might not even hire anyone.

Now suppose the client finally hires someone.

Upwork takes another cut from the freelancer's earnings, anywhere from 0% to 15%, depending on the contract.

The client also pays a marketplace fee of up to 7.99%, plus a possible contract initiation fee.

And when the freelancer finally withdraws their hard-earned money, there may be withdrawal charges, currency conversion costs, and applicable taxes.

Think about that.

You pay to apply.

You pay extra to get noticed.

You pay a percentage when you finally earn.

And you may lose more when you withdraw.

Meanwhile, 175 other freelancers could walk away with nothing after spending their Connects.

I understand that Upwork is a business and needs to make money.

But there's a difference between charging for a service and building a system where freelancers keep paying without any guarantee that a job will ever be awarded.

At what point does Upwork stop being a freelancing platform and start becoming a business built around selling job applications?

What do other freelancers think about this?

I received this email, purporting to be from Upwork, and the links appear to be showing the correct URL. Of course, I have NOT clicked on any links. I've checked PayPal and there's no such activity. Plus, I'm not even sure I understand what it's saying. Plus I don't think I ever signed up for Upwork, though I wondered if I might have a few years ago, and forgot. Anyway, this is the subject line:

Your Account Has Been Debited. If You Are Not Aware Of This Matter Contact Immediately Paypal .. To verify your 999 USDT transaction via PayPal, call 18207582651 invited you to Upwork

For context, I'm in the web dev development niche, and I've just been seeing this crazy number of proposals.

I'm wondering: what are the strategies everybody else is employing to stand out and win clients in this changing scene of Upwork?

It never used to be this competitive, but now it's pretty crazy.

My senior just gave me access to his Upwork profile, and the work is bookkeeping. I am supposed to find new bookkeeping clients. I read a blog on the Upwork website about how to write a proposal, and I know the fundamental concepts of how to write a proposal; below are my problems

1. When I open Upwork, I see others have already submitted proposals on all jobs, and then I think about how I can get this job
2. how far i can go in terms of leaning upwork i mean if i say i will spent 20 minutes daily to learn about upwork what should i do can please someone show me path or give me actionable advise
3. Most importantly, I know that every cover letter should be personalized: read the job post, address the client's problem he/she wants to solve, etc. What are the other things I can spend time daily to learn? Are there YouTube videos worth watching, or what are the resources
4. I think the official Upwork resources for learning Upwork are more than enough; rather than YouTube videos or other websites, maybe I am thinking wrong. Please guide me

I am a beginner; I would encourage seniors to give me advice and a roadmap. Thank you

Upwork has been a rough place for quite some time now. I was actually relieved to find this subreddit and realize it wasn't just me. 😂

I've seen a lot of people deciding to leave the platform, and I get it. At this point, it feels like freelancers are being milked for Connects. Every other month there's another feature that costs Connects, but that doesn't necessarily translate into more proposal views, interviews, or hires.

I've felt the sting myself and seriously considered moving on.

But before I throw in the towel, I'm going to give Upwork one last shot.

I'm doing some research into what's actually working on the platform today, testing different approaches, and trying to look at Upwork through a different lens. Maybe the platform has changed enough that the strategies that worked before simply don't work anymore.

I want to figure out whether there's still a viable way to consistently land clients here, or whether it's genuinely time to move on.

I'm going to document the experiment, share what I'm testing, what works, what doesn't, and the actual results. Good or bad.

For those of you still finding success on Upwork, what's working for you these days? And for those who've left, what was the final straw?

Hello Everyone!

Hope you are all doing good

I am Mechanical Engineering Student with over a year of experience of working as a service provider on Fiverr but I recently left the platform.

I provide services such as Mechanical Design and Simulation Engineer

I want to start on upwork but its too different and needs investment upfront for connects, and I am hesitant to invest before having proper knowledge of bidding and client hunting.

Any advices on how should I start on upwork or any other freelancing platform.

I am new to upwork. I have hearing from many upwork experts that you should get initial reviews doing small projects. But for small projects we have to burn so many credits. Is it worth it?

Did it really help anyone? - getting an initial review to win more projects faster ? I mean getting more views on proposals if you get few reviews?

Or we should not burn out credits for small projects ?

Has anyone else had this happen? I'm genuinely confused and frustrated.

I had an old Upwork account from years ago that I completely forgot about. Made a new one recently to do children's book illustration. Shortly after, I got a message from Trust & Safety saying my old account was blocked but my new one was "still active" and I didn't need to do anything.

So I bought Connects with my own money to get verified for bidding. Then like a week later — permanent block notice on the new account. The same account they just told me was fine.

I appealed by email on Oct 6. Heard nothing for 15 days. Turns out Upwork quietly discontinued email support entirely — I only found out because I got an auto-reply saying "this email is no longer supported" when I emailed them again.

So I resubmitted through their Help Center suspension appeal form. Within literally one minute I got a bot reply saying my account was "either not found or active without any suspensions noted." Like... I HAVE the block notice email. It's right here. And it states my account is suspended when I try to login.

I replied with all the details (username, dates, ticket numbers) and now I'm waiting. They say 48 hours.

Did anyone get their account back after something like this? And did anyone get a refund on Connects they bought because support told them everything was fine? I feel like I'm yelling into a void over here.

I have skills in AutoCAD drafting and modeling. Is it realistic to earn money on Upwork in 2026 by doing drafting work, and how should I get started? Can this become a primary source of income, or are there alternatives and other freelance platforms? Also, I’m from Kazakhstan, and my English is only at a basic, limited level.

i keep seeing these on the main page and they're mostly talking to someone but it's not an invitation or anything

If you could give me just one important piece of advice for succeeding on Upwork, what would it be?

In the past year or so, I've seen several people comment that Upwork has denied payment protection on the grounds that memos were insufficient. A couple have even included screen shots of their memos.

This hasn't happened to me and I have no idea how common it is. I'm calling it out because frequently people come to this forum all wound up about suing Upwork for something or other and those claims are virtually never viable.

If in fact Upwork has established a pattern of denying payment protection arbitrarily and in bad faith based on inconsistent assessment of quailty of memos, that might be a viable claim. While Upwork users have waived their right to pursue class actions, rights of entities like the California AG are not affected.

struggling

Is anyone else noticing fewer decent mobile app development jobs lately? And whenever a good $10k–$20k project shows up, proposals explode within minutes. Just saw a $20k mobile app job with 204 proposals in 8 hours, zero interviews, zero invites, and the client was active 3 hours ago. I've seen similar high-budget jobs sitting for days with barely any client engagement. Are automated bidding tools and agencies flooding everything, or are clients just posting jobs without serious hiring intentions? Are you guys still getting views and interviews, or is Upwork genuinely getting worse?

I'm freelancing on Upwork from time to time, but registered there for about 6 years. I'm doing mostly browser automation, scraping and all that kind of stuff. Want to share what happened and ask if anyone had the same issue and maybe has managed to get a decision like this reversed.

What happened:
I had an hourly contract, 45$/hr with the client. Before starting I gave a rough estimate of 5-10 hours for the simplest approach. During the work we agreed to switch to a more complex stack which added scope. All time was tracked with the desktop app (not manually, screenshots with memos). Every segment had a memo describing what exactly I was doing (development, testing, integration, etc., etc.). After ~11.5 hours the client wasn't happy that it went past the original estimate (which, I emphasize, was made for the simplest approach). We negotiated in Upwork messages, and he explicitly wrote that he'd close the contract and pay for the full ~11.5 hours. I delivered the source code and he ended the contract, leaving 2-stars review. Okay, I can live with it, I've seen douchebags in my life before.

But next, after ~1.5-weeks review and pending period, today, when the payment was due, I got an email from Upwork saying the client's payment was unsuccessfull and my hours didn't qualify for hourly protection. Upwork reasoned it with "insufficient memos" and the full amount was reversed.

No one opened a dispute, nobody asked me anything, the client has the source code and Upwork basically just robbed me, with a nice suggestion to "contact your client for a bonus payment".

What the actual f***? How to deal with it? And, honestly, why the f*** I'm paying all these fees for? When client is good person - I won't face any issues with him, so the Upwork not needed in that case. If the client isn't so good - Upwork won't do a shit to protect me and my earnings, so it is not needed in this case either.

I've been working with an employer for the last 3 months, moved countries to work closer.

He is a work maniac, makes people work over 12 hours per day, I'm on a 60hour per week contract (although I work 12-14 hour days). He offered a direct company contract with Visa sponsorship (in the EU) and it's good money so I accepted coming over, I'm still working uder upwork though.

He's the worst manger I've ever had in my life (I worked in corporate for over a decade). everyone in the company fears him. He screams, curses and fires people on a daily basis, it's a VC funded startup so there's lot of pressure on being profitable which he unloads on anyone who is close.

He recently hired some high performers, didn't like that they were not willing to bow down so he fired them, then he put a negative review on their upwork. Since it's a relative big payout, this affected their score bigtime. I'm afraid of quiting and getting the same review whcih could affect my performance.

Does Upwork have some type of dispute system where freelancers can prove the toxicness of this working relationship? I started recording our interactions where he curses, screams etc, to have some type of evidence for later. Does anyone know what can be done? Any other suggestions on what I should collect?

I can end the contract and move back home easily.. But i'm trying to see how I can challenge the negative rating that will come for leaving.

Am I in for a rude awakening here? 😂 I’m putting together TikTok ads packages and could use a sanity check.

For anyone with relevant experience, I'd really appreciate feedback. Been working in the field for 17 years, but I'm new to Upwork.

Here’s what I'm considering, per month:

• $1,500 for ads management, creative briefs and reporting.
• $1,900 for the above plus five video edits using supplied footage.
• An extra $600 for creator sourcing and coordination.

My contractor budgets would be $400–700 for management, $100–250 for the five edits, and $200–250 for sourcing. I’d hire through Upwork, Fiverr or similar platforms and handle client communication myself.

This would cover one brand/ad account, driving sales to their website. Ad spend, creator fees and sending products to creators would be separate. Platform fees and our own management time aren’t included in those contractor budgets.

Do those budgets seem realistic for experienced contractors, or am I way off base? And are the client prices in line with what people actually pay on Upwork? What monthly ad spend would make sense for these packages?

Feel free to push back on any of it. Firsthand examples would help.

Hourly contract, manual time enabled. The work is judgment-heavy: deciding edge cases, checking them against rules, revisiting borderline calls.

A lot of the real progress happens away from the keyboard: rewatching, letting a call settle, the drift of thought.

Active clicking might be half the hours I log. The rest is thinking that directly shapes the output, but looks like idle time on an activity tracker.

Recently a client was surprised by the total. Not a dispute, just "I expected fewer hours."

So, honest question: how do you handle this?

Do you bill non-active thinking time on hourly contracts?

Do you tell the client upfront how you work, or explain only if asked?

Have you moved this kind of work to fixed price or per-deliverable to avoid the conversation?

Curious where people draw the line.

Open for work? Sure, just pay 14 connects PER WEEK!!!!!!

I feel for webdevs, 95 proposals within 25 mins. And already up to 102 connects top.

Job posting? Shopify webdeveloper. Dang.

Am I the only one or should upwork start doing something about the supply/demand here?