First off let me say this. I was a long time freelancer on Elance and then was moved to Upwork when they merged. I held a 98% Success score for years, I was on their Enterprise Bench - which you don't know what that is you have to be invited by Upwork to be on. I was an elite freelancer and only had 1 bad review in 6 years, and even that one was edited by Upwork because they felt it wasn't fair. That being said, as an elite user, I had a direct line (phone) to their customer service.

Over the course of this year (2017) I discovered, from the inside as an elite user, that two main features of Upwork are NOT what Upwork says they are.

The first feature is the Time Tracker they claim protects freelancers and clients alike. It does not work. It will cut itself off at random. When it does, all a freelancer can do is enter the missing time manually. As soon as you do that, you are no longer protected. All guarantees are null and void. I had tickets open to address the problem for months, Upwork never fixed the problem. They know the problem exists, but has never corrected it.

The second is the JSS (or Job Success Score). This "secret" algorithm is supposed to show a freelancers or clients success rate. It doesn't work at all. It's complete crap and a lie Upwork uses to draw in new freelancers and clients alike. For example, if a client leaves a contract open assuming they will have work later on, Upwork claims that is "Neutral" and does not affect your score. That is a lie, it does drop your JSS score. Any feedback given by a client to a freelancer that criticizes Upwork in anyway will be edited by Upwork. And vice versus. My score in particular dropped from 98% to 88% because of contracts that were open, but had not been active for a few weeks. That doesn't mean the clients or myself did anything wrong or negative and we should not have been penalized. We were.

For a company that takes 20% of any job and monthly subscriptions, these two features should have worked properly. They do not. In my case, Upwork was making easily $600 to $800 a month off of me. For that much money a month, EVERYTHING should work. Yet Upwork knows and has not corrected either of these problems.

In addition, the customer service completely sucks. They do not abide by their own Terms of Service. They routinely ban both clients and freelancers for raising these issues. They edit feedback, forums, anything that criticizes Upwork as a company.

So at the end of the day, you are paying for nothing. The reviews are edited, the scores are not accurate at all, the guarantees are worthless, nothing on that site is true. If you are a freelancer, you will be exploited. If you are a client, you will be lied to. Period.

In my opinion, this site should be hit with a class action lawsuit and forced to return every dime it has ripped off from clients and freelancers. And that's coming from me, one of their chosen elite.