Freelance Marketplaces and their fees
If you are looking for a freelancing platform to help you set up your own freelancing business, you will be glad to know that there are a wealth of excellent choices.
Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal, People Per Hour, and Freelancer are among the main freelance marketplaces you can look at.
Each one has its own benefits and is designed to help freelancers in specific industries or different stages of their careers. You don’t have to sign up to one platform alone; you can mix and match to make sure that you give yourself the best chance of success and changing your future.
Freelance marketplace fees
As we have already looked at, there are a variety of freelance marketplaces out there online. This means that you will have plenty of choices when it comes to running your very own freelancing business.
There are lots of things that you are going to need to think about when it comes to choosing the right marketplace and platform for you. One of these is the fees that are going to be charged.
Fees may not always be the be-all and end-all of choosing a freelancing marketplace. However, it is likely to be a big part of the choice that you make. To help you decide which platform is going to be right for you, we have put together our guide to the main fee levels of each freelance platform for you to decide which one is right for you.
Peopleperhour Fees
Both buyers and freelancers will need to pay fees when they use PPH. For buyers, the fees related to paying money into their escrow account will vary depending on the payment method they choose to use.
The most popular is likely to be either PayPal or card payments, and these come with a service fee. The fee is £0.60 and a 10% charge of the total amount that is being paid in.
For freelancers, the fees related to working through PPH differ from how they work for buyers. PPH aims to create long-term business relationships, which is reflected in how the fees are worked out.
If you, as a freelancer, have worked with a client for a long time and have invoiced more than £5,000 throughout working together (not on one single project), you will pay a 3.5% service fee. If you have worked with them and charged between £250 and £5000, then the fee is 7.5%, and if you have worked with them below the £250 mark, it will be 20%.
There is also a fee charged for making a withdrawal of any money in your account, but again this will depend on the type of account to which you are withdrawing the money.
Freelancer Fees
Freelancer is entirely free to sign up for and to post projects on. However, for buyers, a fee of 3% will need to be made for every freelancer you work with within a project.
For freelancers, the main fees will be charged for working on both projects and contests. The charge for these is the same, and it doesn’t matter what type of project it is. There is either a charge of 10% or £3.50. Whichever is greater. This is fixed for hourly projects, projects, and their contest process.
Toptal Fees
Unlike other freelance platforms out there, Toptal makes their money by charging the client rather than the freelancer. It is free to work through Toptal as a freelancer (although you need to recognise how hard it is to be approved to work through this portal).
Toptal charges a fee that relates to the freelancer’s hourly rate that they choose to work with. This is, for the most part, around twice their hourly rate. Therefore, if you are a client working through Toptal, you will be looking at pay double for whichever freelancer you choose for your work. Something important to keep in mind when it comes to budgeting for your project.
Fiverr Fees
Like many of the other platforms, Fiverr will charge both the buyers and the sellers fees. These fees vary depending on the size and budget of the project being worked on. For buyers, there is an administrative fee, and this is set at 5.5% of the purchase amount of the project cost.
If this cost is less than $50, then there will also be a $2 fee charged alongside the 5.5%. Sellers also have to pay a fee for securing work through the portal. This is set at 20% of the overall charge of the project, no matter the cost or how frequently you work with that seller.
Upwork Fees
Freelancers that work through the portal will be charged on a sliding scale charged per client that you work with. For earnings up to $500, this is 20%; between $500 and $10,000, it goes down to 10%, and if you earn over $10,000 from one client, this will be reduced to 5%.
This means that the more work that you can secure with one client, then all the better, rather than spreading your work out between multiple clients and multiple projects. It seems evident across a variety of different freelancing platforms when it comes to charging freelance platform fees.
Hopefully, this blog post has helped you decide which freelancing platform will be right for you. Whether you choose based on the benefits of each, the industries that you target, or perhaps the fees you will pay each month or each project you work on.
Being able to balance up what is right for you will give you the best chance to find the right platform for you and make sure that you have the success that you hope for in your platform.
