Joined Elance.com
After reading this news article, (funnily enough through my RSS feed of digg.com’s programming section) I decided to sign up for a month to see what Elance.com was like.
Basically Elance is a community to bring together people who want to do work and people need work doing. People or companies post projects in the various categories and then service providers must make proposals, the most impressive being likely to get the contract. Posting projects is free and the charges are made to the people providing the work at a rate of 8.75%.
This seems quite costly for the freelancers, expecially seeing as you have to pay to subscribe as well, but as a trial I’ll try and complete projects at cost and not make a profit.
February 15th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Well, I’ll be interested to see how your trial goes. I’ve been with Elance for several years (going all the way back to when it was free). I agree. The transaction fees are way too steep, but I just pass them along to my buyers. I’m not a big proponent of the site as a whole, but it serves well for fill-in-the-gap work.
February 21st, 2007 at 5:57 pm
How are things going? I also have been with Elance for a couple of years mostly as a provider and have had pretty good success with it. It’s a decent supplement to my “day job”. I just see the fee as a cost of doing business. There aren’t too many other marketing venues where I can display my warez to qualified leads for that price.
I’ve also become a pretty avid buyer as well. It’s nice having several good providers to use when I don’t have the time to keep my website fresh and moving forward. It’s amazing how easy it is to get sucked in to using it.
February 22nd, 2007 at 2:14 am
Not too badly, I’ve been ‘tendering’ for smaller scripting jobs, like yourself, I only want it as a compliment to my full-time job. I got one job doing PHP scripting which lead to more work with the same people.
I don’t doubt the subscription fee, I appreciate that and like you say see it as decent value for the leads you are getting, but the commision charge on transactions seems hefty to me.