Best place to buy freelancer services
I’ve been working with freelancers from all the world for the last 18 month. It’s an easy way to get things done fast. You post your assignments, and then workers may bid on your project. Is not always the cheapest one that are the best, make sure you read the reviews. If a freelancer don’t have reviews from other customers then ask them for work samples so you can decide if they good or not.
After 18 month I can say that we are at the moment experience enormous inflation in the internet economy. The hour rate for a freelancer have raised over 150% in the last year. The amount of people working as freelancers have also increased. China is the country where the prices have increased the most, more then 200% on a year. This is due to Chinese language skills are hard to find and many companies need to translate there sites and texts to Chinese. There is also a problem with more new buyers that don’t really know how much to pay there freelancers per hour.
A majority of all freelancers are situated in India. But I wouldn’t recommend them, hire a Philippine or a Chinese instead. Philippines and Chinese can think for them self, Indian freelancers are so afraid of making wrong so they will end up asking you about everything and that takes a lot of time. Most of the communication is done through different IM softwares (like gtalk, msn, icq, skype, yahoo im).
Today oDesk released an interesting service, where they have based on there freelancers average rate and location have aggregated country specific price maps in google maps. Unfortunately this map will only raise the salaries more, because they aren’t reflecting the reality. I’ve been trying a lot of different sites to find good and competent people, and oDesk is not the cheapest, see list below.
According to oDesk you will have to pay 14$ per hour for a freelancer in India, this is not true. Maybe on oDesk, but if you go to other sites on the net you will find that the rates are often negotiable. If “Bevarn” from India have listed his hourly rate to 15$, you can always talk him down to a much lower salary. But don’t go to low, it should be a win-win situation. You should always pay what you think is fare, there’s no point in forcing people in to slavery.
So for the list of places to buy good services to good prices.
Getafreelancer.com
This is by far the biggest and best site to find good people, most people are situated in India, Pakistan, Philippines and China. Lately unfortunately, I’veca noticed an increase of “gold-diggers” on this site. What I mean is people that have heard they can make good money and promise a lot, but don’t really know anything and can’t deliver.
Getacoder.com
Not that big, seems to be a lot of fictive bids (bids made to look like the site are more active and bigger then it really is). The same people here as you can find on GAF (getafreelancer).
oDesk.com
Big site, good features, lot of people. Here you have an even wider spread of people from all over the world. But regarding the prices and hourly rates shown in the image above it’s not that good.
guru.com
Big American site, here you will find many American working for salaries often far higher then Europe. This is probably a good place to find staff in US, that you want to hire for shorter assignments. There are freelancers from China and India here as well, but they are to expensive to work with.
I know I’ve only mentioned some of the sites, last time I looked (in September) there where more then 100 sites for freelancers. But I can really recommend it, it works fine. But beware of Indians promising more then they can deliver. I work with three Indians and it works well, so of course there exist good ones as well.
I hope that the tv blends more with internet so we soon can see these shows in front of the tv instead of the computer.
