Fewer bids, better ones, on a site you control

What Freelancer.com is, and who it suits

Freelancer.com is a hosted marketplace organised around projects and contests. A buyer posts a project and receives quotes from freelancers, or starts a contest and receives entries. Its home page lists everything from logo design and web development to writing, data entry, translation, legal work and manufacturing. It also lists local jobs, a recruiter service, project management help and enterprise offers.

It suits buyers who want a lot of choice quickly, and freelancers who are comfortable competing for work in public. The platform handles payments and disputes and sets the rules.

The model is volume. Many buyers meet many freelancers, and the market sorts itself out. That works very well for some jobs and badly for others.

Volume versus curation

The real question is not which marketplace has more features. It is whether your buyers want many answers or a few good ones.

Bidding volume rewards price and speed. A buyer posting a simple, well-defined job gets plenty of choice and can pick the cheapest. For a complex job, the same crowd makes the buyer sort noise. A curated marketplace works the other way. You have fewer vendors, so each brief gets fewer answers, and each answer comes from someone you have already accepted.

A few signs tell you which side you are on:

• Buyers in your niche compare on price first, or on proof of skill first.
• A bad hire costs your buyer an afternoon, or costs them a client.
• You can name the vendors you would be proud to list.
• Your buyers ask for options, or they ask for someone they can trust.

Neither is correct for everyone. A niche that depends on trust, such as legal, financial or medical writing, tends to suit curation. Commodity work where price decides everything tends to suit the crowd.

Contests, and what we do not have

Contests are the clearest difference. On Freelancer.com’s contest page, a buyer sets a prize and receives entries, and the page advertises satisfaction and a money-back guarantee. The buyer sees finished options and pays for one.

WP Sell Services has no contests. We confirmed that in the product before writing this. The closest thing is a buyer request, where vendors send proposals. A proposal contains a pitch, a price and a timeline, not finished work.

If you want contest-style work, you could ask vendors to attach samples to their proposals, and some will. That is a convention, not a feature, and it asks vendors to work unpaid, so think hard before you encourage it.

A second honest gap: there is no hourly contract and no time tracking, and buyers cannot invite a specific vendor to a request. Work is priced as a fixed amount or in milestones.

How a project becomes an order

This is the bidding side, and all of it is free.

1. The buyer posts a request. Title, description, category, a fixed budget or a range, a deadline, skills and attachments. Posting costs nothing and the request stays open for 30 days by default.
2. Approved vendors answer. Each sends one proposal with a cover letter, a price, a delivery time and optional attachments. A vendor can link an existing service as proof of work.
3. The buyer compares. Proposals show whether they are fixed or milestone plans, with the vendor’s ratings and profile.
4. The buyer accepts one. An order is created and the other proposals are declined.
5. The order runs. Requirements, delivery, revisions, completion and review follow the standard order workflow.

For a milestone plan, the buyer pays one phase at a time, and the next phase only opens once the previous one is approved. Money is not held in advance for later phases.

What the buyer sees

A buyer on your site posts a request in a form and gets an email and an in-app notice each time a proposal arrives. They open the request, read each cover letter, check the vendor’s profile, ratings and level, and accept one. If nothing arrives, the request expires after its window and they can repost it with changes.

Buyers do not pay to post. They pay when they accept and check out. That keeps the front door open and keeps the cost of a wrong guess low.

What the vendor sees

A vendor browses open requests, filters by category, searches by keyword and sorts by budget or date. They pitch with a cover letter and a price, and can edit the proposal while it is still pending. If the buyer picks someone else, the proposal is marked rejected. There is no limit on active proposals, so the discipline has to come from your terms and your vendor approval, not from a bid allowance.

The catalogue beside the bids

A project marketplace sells custom work. Many buyers also want something fixed and quick. The same WP Sell Services site lists ready-made services, each with Basic, Standard and Premium packages, add-ons, FAQs and a requirements form the buyer fills in after paying.

That means a buyer who needs a standard logo or a one-hour consultation can order at once, while a buyer with an unusual job posts a request. You can lead with either. The two marketplace modes post explains how to choose.

The catalogue also gives new vendors a way to earn a first review without winning a competitive bid, which helps a young marketplace build proof. Free allows three add-ons, four gallery images, five FAQs and five buyer requirements per service. Pro lifts those limits.

The money side

In a project model, price is part of the pitch, so the way the commission is applied matters to vendors. A vendor who quotes a fixed amount wants to know what lands in their wallet. The earnings dashboard shows cleared, pending and lifetime earnings, and the ledger lists every movement, so a vendor never has to ask.

You set one global commission, from 0 to 50 percent, and override it for any vendor. It is taken from the vendor’s earnings on completion, or at payment time for milestone phases, tips and paid extensions.

On the free plugin, checkout is built in with Stripe, PayPal and offline payment. Vendors request withdrawals; you set a minimum and a clearance period, approve them and mark them paid. A CSV of what is owed helps with bank transfers and PayPal bulk uploads.

Pro automates payouts with Stripe Connect and PayPal Payouts, and adds WooCommerce checkout, Razorpay, tiered commission rules and vendor subscription plans. Milestone and tip payments work on the built-in checkout and on WooCommerce. Recurring billing for services is not available; do not buy Pro for it.

What it costs you to run

Think of the cost in two layers. The first is cash: hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, payment gateway fees and, if you want automation, a Pro licence. The second is attention. A marketplace is a small business with two customers, the buyer and the vendor, and both expect an answer when something goes wrong.

Freelancer.com’s costs sit in its fees and memberships; check the vendor’s site for the current terms. Yours sit in running a website: hosting, a domain, updates, gateway fees, and time for support, moderation and payouts.

A realistic plan covers three jobs. Someone approves vendors and watches quality. Someone answers disputes. Someone fills the marketplace with buyers. In a small niche that is one person with a good calendar. The core plugin is free, and Pro is a paid yearly licence; see pricing.

Skills are modest for a normal setup. A wizard creates the pages and sets the essentials. Changing templates, adding hooks or scripting bulk work is developer work.

Trust, vetting and disputes

A crowd platform can afford to lose some vendors, because more arrive every day. You cannot. Each vendor you approve is part of what a buyer thinks of your site, so approval is the most important setting you have, and it costs nothing but time.

Freelancer.com lists programs such as Verified and Preferred freelancers, and a platform that carries payments. A new site has none of that history, so the trust has to come from how you run it.

What the product gives you:

• A vendor approval step and optional service moderation.
• Reviews and star ratings, with moderation and vendor replies.
• Four seller levels, three earned from order history and one you award.
• A public profile and portfolio for every vendor.
• A dispute process with evidence from both sides and admin mediation.

Contest platforms handle one more thing quietly, which is who owns the work when a design is not chosen. That question does not arise in a proposal model, but you should still write down who owns delivered files and when. What you do yourself: set the terms, decide who is good enough, and settle disputes fairly and in good time. Members can also report a service or a seller, which reaches a screen in wp-admin.

Data, ownership and moving over

Owning the data also means owning the numbers that decide your next move: which categories draw requests, which vendors win, and how long a typical order takes from payment to review.

Buyers, vendors, requests, proposals, orders, messages and reviews live in your WordPress database. You can reach them through the REST API and WP-CLI, and WordPress privacy tools export or erase a member’s data.

There is no importer from Freelancer.com. Moving across is a rebuild: vendors recreate profiles and services through the wizard, or a developer scripts it. Reviews stay on the old platform.

A staging and launch checklist

1. Run the setup wizard on a staging copy.
2. Set the commission, currency and withdrawal rules.
3. Approve a few test vendors and post a few test requests.
4. Accept a fixed proposal and a milestone proposal and finish both.
5. Open and resolve a dispute.
6. Approve a test withdrawal.
7. Write your terms and refund policy.
8. Recruit real vendors, then invite buyers.

The rest of the stack on the same site

WP Sell Services is one of several separate, optional plugins from the same team. They run on one WordPress site and one login. You install, host and update each of them.

The connections we can state are in the marketplace itself. Checkout is the built-in one, or WooCommerce with Pro. EDD and FluentCart adapters exist in Pro but are in beta and not offered by default. Gateways are Stripe, PayPal and offline payment, with Razorpay in Pro. Vendor payouts run through Stripe Connect or PayPal Payouts in Pro, and delivery files can go to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or DigitalOcean Spaces in Pro. See integrations.

The sister products run on the same site, and we claim no integration between them and the marketplace:

• BuddyNext for community.
• Jetonomy for forum and Q&A.
• Learnomy for courses.
• Listora for a directory.
• WP Career Board for a job board.
• Eventonomy for events.
• WB Gamification for points and badges.

The themes BuddyX Pro and Reign are from the team as well. A hosted marketplace is one bill and takes a cut. These are separate plugins you run yourself, so you keep the margin and carry the upkeep.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Upwork wins on a very large supply of freelancers and a mature hiring process.
• Fiverr wins when buyers want ready-made services from a large built-in audience.
• Sharetribe wins when you want a hosted builder with a negotiation flow and no server to manage.
• Dokan is a WordPress multi-vendor plugin we compare on its own page.
• WCFM Marketplace is another WordPress option with its own page.
• WC Vendors is a third, compared separately.

Who should stay with Freelancer.com

Stay if you want contests, a deep pool of freelancers in many fields or the choice of a hundred bids. Stay if you are a freelancer who earns from the platform’s search and has no audience elsewhere. Stay if you would rather not run a site, take support questions or settle a dispute.

Build your own if you have a defined niche and a way to reach it. The strongest sign is that you already know a group of people who want the work done and a group who can do it, and the only missing piece is a place to meet. A marketplace amplifies a relationship that exists. It rarely creates one from nothing, so start with a small circle, serve it well and widen it once the orders flow. See features, free versus Pro and the request marketplace use case.