99designs

Hi i recently just won a $500 Contest threedays ago and today my account got hold. Like wtf? My account is 100% verified and my designs are totally juiced from my brains. Srsly 99Design? Is this how you treat designers when theyve won your money? Guess what, YOU ARE $#*!.

Awesome platform if you're looking for any type of design work for your business. It allows you to run contests for particular designs you are after (web pages, logos etc.). Designers then come up with concepts that you can accept and work some more on it with them, until you get what you want, or you can decline designs that are not for you. There are 4 pricing tiers you can choose for contests and I used the 2nd tier. With that most of the designs I received I declined (13 maybe). There was maybe 4 designs that were decent and we could work with. However one of the first designs we received, took on our feedback and we new fairly early on that this was the designer and design we would be going with. So in the end it worked out really well. There is a money back guarantee during the first phase of the contest so if there's nothing you like you don't lose your money (so that's good). Anyway overall it was a good experience. Oh, they also have the option to work directly with designers for a fixed price (I haven't used that yet though).

Great service. Variety of designs. What a brilliant company to create an affordable contest that brings multiple designers to the table. It was a positive experience from the beginning to the end.

My research of this website and their activity is 2 long years! You really really don; t want to take a big fall as designer to loose your work and as buyer loose your money.

99 designs has helped me become better at my craft and for that, I love it! There are world-class designers working for 99 designs, which inspires me greatly!

We've done 2 design contest and are really impressed with the quality of designs and the ease of process. The most difficult part has been choosing a final winner from so many quality designs.

Fun, easy and extremely organized! I really enjoyed the process. Designers were extremely responsive to requests and revisions. I would highly recommend 99 Designs

Money back guarantee is a scam!

I requested for a refund via email and this is the reply I received:

"To request a refund, please have your account information on file, and call during the business hours listed below for each country (Monday to Friday) - it is very important for us to verify your information via phone.

San Francisco | 8am-5pm PST:
*******678 (from USA or Canada) or
*******678 (from any other country)

Australia | 9am-5pm AEDT:
03 9111 5799

United Kingdom | 9am-9pm GMT:
*******220 "

I tried calling for the past 3 days and no one is picking up the phone. Support team is either sleeping or the whole money back guarantee is a scam. There's no way you can get your money back if no one is answering the phone.

I wouldn't recommend using 99designs. Designers are using stock-images, copy-paste technique which they excel in. Beware of using 99designs.

I could not be happier with my results. The accuracy and speed was amazing. After my first comments on the original designs the artist was able to create exactly what I was seeing in my head.

This was my first experience and I am very pleased with the final results. The artist were all very talented and professional. The customer service available and very helpful.
Thank you so much!

In germany, it is a legal offense to contact domain owners to offering services.
Apart from this, it is absolutely unprofessional to offer prices for such bog-standard websites like this.

This was one of the easiest things I have ever done. In 3 days I had the perfect logo for my company for way cheaper than if I had done it somewhere else! I highly recommend it!

I knew of 99 designs for quite a while, but this is the first time using them. I was blown away by the quality of designers - This is the go to logo service - Will be using 99 designs again!

Working with 99designs was super easy, I got a lot of great designs and I enjoyed being able to work with designers to hone in on what I wanted. I would definitley recommend this service.

Used 99Designs for a logo for my new startup. Could not be happier with the designs submitted and the overall experience. So easy and so professional. Absolutely love my final logo!

I really like the concept of a design contest. The traditional transaction of just hiring a single designer for a single transaction that may never develop into your vision is unnerving. The design contest takes the pressure off the client and fuels the drive of competing designers. I will be honest. I was getting impatient with the results of my design contest early on and tried hard to keep faith in the process. The night before my design started to blossom, I almost pulled the plug on the entire operation. I woke up to a beautiful revision from my winning designer that put a smile back on my face. My vision was finally back on track after it was flying off the rails. I couldn't be happier with the end result of my logo as well as the new relationship I developed with my designer. I wanted an emotional connection to my brand upon sight of the logo. My designer made that a reality along with communicating flawlessly the whole way there. I am so, so thankful for this service! And shout out to Alli Schultz of Nomad Boutique who recommended this site and the design contest!

This is the second competition we have run and are very pleased with the results. We had submissions from all over the world and had conversations with designers we would never have had access to.

I was looking for a similar service when I stumbled upon their website and it's One of the things that that made me use their service. The website was quite the charmer.

The quality here is really mixed. If you need something designed that is cheap and generic, 99 designs is for you. If you need something really good, I'd go elsewhere.

We couldn't be happier with our 99designs experience. The contest was easy to run and gave up 50+ designs to consider. We saw some great work, and are very pleased with our winning selection.

Work quality very amuture and poor
Waited 8 days, spent work days just to receive zero.
Good support on chat on line.

But they really know how to market themselves

Great experience! I felt the process was very helpful to finally decide on the best designer. I received 100s of of design options and ultimately narrowed it down to 6.

For about $600.00 I ended up having 20+ offshore designers all generically copying the first two designs that I gave 4 or 5 stars. I had to get really specific (and directly message most of them) to get any of them to develop anything original.

There also seems to be a HUGE issue with fraud. Designs in my contest were constantly being withdrawn (or designers' account suspended mid-contest) because they were ripping off other designs as blatantly as possible and/or simply reposting designs verbatim. I did a little snooping and found that multiple entry level designers in my contest were taking designs from better designers (from within my contest) and posting them to their own profiles as samples, continuing the cycle of fraud into other design contests.

I'm savvy enough to catch this, but I worry for all the mom-and-pop shops out there who wouldn't think to thoroughly review designer profiles and catch the scammers.

There also seems to be no chat support on the site, which (again based on experience) is a clear indicator that they anticipate their customers being annoyed and don't want to deal with it, so it's easier to funnel everyone into generic support FAQs.

Ultimately, after a lot of legwork I was able to weed out the crappy designers and find a couple of good ones, but it was a messy process. This one time I used 99Designs will probably be the only time. I'll stick with real agency designs going forward, even if it costs a bit more.