Upwork

Verdict: the marketplace for people, not deliverables. Hire here when the job is “help me every week,” not “make me this.”

What it does

Upwork is a freelance marketplace built around contracts: you post a job, freelancers propose, and you hire on an hourly or fixed-price basis with time tracking, milestones, and payment protection. For sellers it is where the ongoing roles get filled: a virtual assistant for customer messages and catalog work, a PPC manager, a bookkeeper who knows settlement reports, a 3D render artist on retainer.

Fees (checked 20 October 2026)

• Joining is free on the Basic client plan.
• Client marketplace fee: 5% on all payments (3% for eligible US clients paying from a checking account), plus a one-time contract initiation fee of $0.99 to $14.99 per contract.
• Business Plus: a 10% fee (8% via US checking account) with no initiation fee on most contracts, plus team features; Direct Contracts on that tier cost $49 a month per active contract.
• Freelancers pay a variable service fee of 0% to 15% per contract, set when the contract starts.

Budget about 5% plus a few dollars per hire. Both fee structures changed in 2025: the client fee was a flat 3%, and the freelancer fee was a flat 10%.

Who it is for

Sellers ready to delegate a recurring function. The hourly contract with time tracking is the right structure for a VA; a fixed-price milestone contract is the right one for a project with a defined end.

Who should skip it

Anyone with a one-off deliverable under a few hundred dollars; Fiverr is faster and the proposals-and-interviews cycle on Upwork is overhead you do not need. Also skip it if you are not going to write a real job post; vague posts attract a hundred boilerplate proposals.

Runs our store

Upwork is where our recurring help has come from. The job-post trick worth stealing is a specific question at the top that only a real applicant will answer; it filters the bulk proposals out in one line.

The honest caveats

The 2025 fee changes made small contracts more expensive and pushed freelancers to raise rates. Proposal quality has dropped as AI-written applications flood every post. And payment protection on hourly contracts depends on the freelancer using the time tracker.

Bottom line

Write a sharp post, interview three people, start with a small paid test. No affiliate link; vendor link below.

See Upwork client pricing