As a client, what are my alternatives to Upwork?
if you're in france and maybe europe malt is a good site
Upwork just stole $10k from me
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Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#12Unacceptable, hope this gets visibility and fixed
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#13As a client, what are my alternatives to Upwork?
Fiver?
Nitpick, but I think you mean Fiverr rather than Fiver.
There's also:
- PeoplePerHour.co.uk (UK based, not sure of international presence)
- Freelancer.com
- Toptal (but I think they have some sort of approval process that may be a bit arduous)
- Guru.com
- Codeable.io
- Outsourcely.com
- Truelancer.com
- Konker
- Servicescape
- Solidgig (but stronger for design and marketing/SEO roles, I think - considered dropping into the category below)
- Hubstaff Talent
- FlexJobs (but more oriented toward IT and accounting than software development; again, considered dropping into the more specalised category below)
Additional specialist companies I'm aware of that target roles other than developers:
- 99Designs (for, you guessed it, designers and UX) - https://99designs.co.uk/
- Savio (market researchers) - https://savio.pro/
- F-LEX (legal) - https://flex.legal/
Hope you manage to pick up more work soon, but also that you manage to get yours and your clients money back from Upwork.
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#14Welcome to HN where we provide support after large corporations fail to do basic due diligence.
A moderator replied to me a couple months ago that these kinds of posts are usually penalized so HN doesn’t become a support site, but I still see them quite often on here on the front page. I had been commenting that when such posts are made for YC companies, they rarely make it to the front page.
> there has been a glut lately of stories using HN as customer-support-of-last-resort or generic-complaints-about-$company, and we've been hearing an increasing amount of community complaints and pushback about those. HN's standard mod practice is to downweight most such threads
I’m guessing that Upwork is not a YC company.
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#15What's the best approach for suing US companies if you're not in the US? I doubt the effort to bring an international case will be worth it for $10k. Can you easily sue in the US as a non-citizen + non-resident? Can you expect one of those outrageously high verdicts so that lawyers might take your case for a cut of the winnings if they believe they have a good chance to either win or settle?
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Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#16Spend $100k that he doesn't have on lawyers only to potentially recover $10k good times. Corporations need to be fined millions of dollars every single time this happens even once.
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#17What's the best approach for suing US companies if you're not in the US? I doubt the effort to bring an international case will be worth it for $10k. Can you easily sue in the US as a non-citizen + non-resident? Can you expect one of those outrageously high verdicts so that lawyers might take your case for a cut of the winnings if they believe they have a good chance to either win or settle?
For $10K there is no solution and companies know that. That's why it is becoming a big risk.
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#18This is very serious. As these platform become bigger and bigger they become difficult to avoid for customers and workers.
Either a company would need to be extremely diligent about fixing workflow exceptions or they would be overwhelmed by the cost of support, especially across countries.
And I used to work for a bank which took years to put password reset online, despite it being 25% of support calls. And we only operated in one province.
Companies would need to fundamentally change their cultures to fix this kind of issue as often the team doing the dev isn’t even aware of the support issues it creates.
Nobody on the IT team even knew password reset was 1/4 of support.
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#19I had a large sum of money scammed from my credit card a few weeks ago - a single transaction to Upwork. I'd never heard of them before this month.
I know it's not the same issue, and the creds obviously came from somewhere else, but the amount of fishy reports I found just searching them here on Hacker News means I will never go near them.
Re: Upwork just stole $10k from me
#20>Provided the documents, went through the visual verification with a webcam, answered the questions, and solved the programming task live, ...
Excuse me, WTF? You have to code something in order to get verified? (!)