People Per Hour: My Story

Maktina

PPH should be avoided unless you have a rare talent that isn't already covered by the majority - Their customer support 'ninjas' are terrible and have a serious control-freak attitude, their fees only favour the well paid freelancers (a.k.a the lucky ones) and the majority of jobs are underpaid and undercut. PPH take way too much money from freelancers. If you're one of the lucky ones to have established yourself early on at PPH, then you're golden. If not - Well you'd probably have better luck starting your own independent freelance business.

SouthUKMan

Hi. Thought I'd chip in with this as I've been doing bits of work through PPH for a couple of years and my experience is a little different. For me the best aspect of PPH is the fact that you can set Hourlies. These are tasks that people can order from you at a set price. You're in control of what jobs you offer and at what price (obviously you factor in PPH's fee). The other beauty of Hourlies is that people come to you...you don't need to log on every day to sort through hundreds of jobs. I imagine that for the vast majority of people, and certainly for me, PPH could NEVER provide a full time income (it wouldn't come anywhere close). However PPH has allowed me to earn a useful amount of pocket money for little effort. PPH are entitled to take a commission fee - simply build that in to your costs.

Faryad

If you read this, probably you want to make sure about the place in which you want to invest your time, effort, and money. This will help you. These limited words are summary of 2 years. We were on page 3 and was ranked as 119th - TOP. I didn’t sleep for nights till I got there…
For *whatever* I say here, emails and replies exist as proof and I’ll be glad to share them.

My story on PeoplePerHour began on 18th of Jun 2014. Let me copy-paste the first email:
“I am Faryad, from Iran. I am leading an expert team for graphics design, web design, and web development. My question is, as an Iranian, can we work in your website with no concern?”

Reply:
“Hello Faryad
Thank you for your message.
People from all over the world are allowed to work on the site, there is no restriction for them. You are welcome to work on our site. You can register and get work.
Best wishes for your business in PPH.”

We signed up. For many times I noticed there are somethings wrong with the platform but I thought maybe these are software bugs. I didn’t care much and each time I composed lists of bug reports trying to report strange behaviors of the platform in my long lists of bugs. Each time they were telling me things like “that’s fine, we are working on it! Oh, we are sorry to hear this, we are fixing.” Stuff like this. I noticed that this is an official robbery because a mistake may happen once or twice accidentally- not after reporting it for hundreds of times. Let me clarify one after another about how they rob you (sellers) specially using their smart proposal credit system. Since I wasn’t a buyer on this scamming website, I don’t know how they rob buyers and I leave this for buyers to review.

-Proposal credits are not free on this platform. If you want to bid on jobs, you have to buy them. Each proposal credit costs something about 1.5 GBP. They claim each month they give you 15 free credits. They are right. They do this till you get to a point. When you start growing and need to buy more credits, thievery starts. Suppose you have 85 credits. In the beginning of each month, instead of adding 15 free credits, they RESET your credits to 15. Yes! Don’t be shocked! For my last 4 months of working I noticed this robbery and each month I was reporting this to the whole team (support, product, web designer). We had two accounts and this was happening to both of them. They told me, hey, sorry for this! Maybe this is a bug or something. Here are some credits!! And I didn’t know how many credits did I have before getting robbed.

-When someone posts a job, sellers start to bid. If, after bidding a buyer changes or updates his job or his budget, according to their own terms and email notifications, sellers can cancel proposals and credits must be refunded. This happens very frequently. Someone posts a job for $200 and after 15 minutes changes the budget to $50 (thanks to the uncontrolled bids and junk system of bidding). They claim you can send another proposal for the same job without losing any credits. Guess what? When you cancel your proposal, the credit will NOT refund. If you send another proposal for the same job, ANOTHER credit is consumed and will never refund. This means if you cancel your proposal and send another one, you will lose 2 credits!! A very sneaky type of robbery! This also applies to what they call Featured Proposal Credit which is a more expensive type of proposal credit and features (so-called) the proposal. Featured proposals does NOTHING and they will NOT refund to your account just like normal credits. They just add a ribbon to your proposal and this is what you pay 5 pounds for.

-PPH is a great place for posting fake and scamming jobs because no one controls anything. They filter things randomly. Spammers and fraudulent buyers keep posting spamming jobs. Newbies and those who are not aware of threats keep sending proposals for all types of jobs. They bid and bid and they lose credits very quickly. Guess what? If after reporting a job (by the community and for hundreds of times) they moderate the fake job, credits will NOT refund to bidders’ accounts. Also if they don’t moderate fake jobs, they will stay pending forever and so does your poor proposal. This means for each pending job you waste your time and your credit (money) like a charm! You will never get your credit back. According to my working experience for 2 years more than %60 of jobs is fake and they remain pending forever. I’ve reported this in detail for more than 10 times and each time they only thank me for reporting!

Mid-July I decided to ask them to stop robbing us. I sent them an email telling them about all these events including more thievery scenarios. I asked them to stop filching. Guess what? They have deactivated my account in less than 1 hour!! I asked the reason and they sent me one of their junk corporate emails telling me that I have violated their terms! I immediately contacted Christina P (don’t write the full name for her privacy) which works in their product team. Christina was the ONLY helpful person and she was not aware of the stealing algorithm of the platform. She reactivated my account and said this was a mistake! So what if I didn’t have her direct email?! I regained access to my account and was happy that I had it again because it included 2 full years of non-stop working of a group of people. But this isn’t the end!

Three weeks later I received a system email:
“Thank you for using PPH.
In a recent compliance review, we have noted that your account is based in Iran.
In line with UK AML regulations, PPH is unable to support users operating from this location. As a result, we need to close your account and are providing you with 1 week's notice of closure to complete any work in progress. To find out more, please visit section 2 of our terms and conditions.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused however please note this is for compliance reasons.”

I said WHAT??? First of all, what the … does AML mean??? I googled it and found the abbreviation. I was so shocked that couldn’t talk for few hours because:

-After working as a freelancer for the first year, we closed our offices and focused on working at home. Now we didn’t have any office and we were going to lose our freelancing job as well.

-It wasn’t about me only. I was concerned about my wife and her team. She faithfully worked on this platform non-stop and we managed to serve about 170 clients from more than 30 countries. We had 178 positive feedbacks and our rating was %99.6. What about our exceptional customer testimonials? Those magnificent clients had written marvellous reviews about our performance and we were relying on their words for our future projects/positions. Are we going to lose them all?

-I was always sending them bug reports and feature requests. Their product team thanked me personally for many times. More than 100 bugs have been reported by me and they used my ideas to improve their scamming platform and now they are banning me! Can you imagine this?!

-I never charged my clients outside PPH because I was loyal and committed to their system. We used to have customers with monthly invoices but I never accepted their payment offer outside PPH. They could simply and easily send their money to my withdrawal account and therefore we didn’t have to pay any share to PPH. I didn’t do this because I was committed to those beasts.

-We had sent our CVs to different locations for different positions. Link to our profile was included in all of our CVs and if they close our account, the link will return a nasty error page instead of our beautiful customer testimonials. So what about those people reading our CVs? Most probably they will think we are lying to them. Can you imagine? My profile includes 2 years of our most recent career and the most important ones because they are recent. If we lose them, we had a 2-years gap in our career and people with link to our profile think we want to cheat them.

Let’s get back to the AML thing. They deactivated our accounts again. This easy! I searched UK authorities and asked about the AML claim. Here’s the result. Please google “uk advisory aml notice june 2016” and read page 1 of the first PDF. Here’s the last line from page 1 I copy from the document:

“On 24 June 2016, the FATF suspended its call for countermeasures against Iran for twelve months.”

If it was about AML rules, these rules were onset from 2007, so why did they let us (Iranians) join their website on 2014 with a very warm welcome and without restrictions? On the other hand, if they are obeying AML rules it clearly states that countermeasures are suspended for one year and this document has been released on June; that is 2 months before PPH thieves warn us with their fake AML message.

Wait! There’s more! Hearing this will drop your jaws: still, there are some active Iranian profiles on the website!!! Please check it for yourself. Go to freelancer’s section and search for Iran. They kept those poor rookies active. It seems like they are planned to be robbed after they gather some money for them in their small wallets.

I have more surprises for you readers. They closed our account; swallowed the money in our wallet; stole the money in our pending invoices; and clearly stated that they won’t give us access again EVEN IF we live somewhere else than Iran!!!! Let me copy-paste:

“Hello,
So this means PeoplePerHour.com has closed our account, withdraws our earned money for itself, and won't give back our account even if we exit Iran.
Can you please confirm this?”

“Hello Faryad,
Thank you for your message.
I can now confirm this Faryad.
Your account will remain closed.
Thank you for your patience and if you have any other question regarding our case please let me know.
Kind Regards,
Natalie
PPH Senior Advisor”

PPH thieves:
You will be more arrogant if you sell yourselves instead of robbing people like this. Your children will read your story.

Bmth100

A lot of new users with a lot of opinions.. ��

Bearly

I use PPH to hire people..and they always complain about how much peopleperhour takes from the money they earn...it's quite substantial I am told. I like finding great writers/artists on there for my websites etc but if I am establishing a long term relationship then I prefer moving away from the site. It is, however, against PPH's terms and conditions to pay someone outside of PPH (for further work etc).

madonnamustache

Hello,

We got scammed by a freelancer on People Per Hour. They did not deliver the project more than two months after the deadline, and caused us huge losses and distress. Their coding was so bad, it broke everything. Now we have to find someone else to fix these issues, and People Per Hour are not helping to get a refund for the funds we've paid. They are happy to take their commission, but when there are issues - you are left high and dry. They seem to take on coders with fake portfolios and references, and they need to take some responsibility for that.

This has been the most frustrating experience ever.

:(:(

Lanera123

Lots of opinions so thought I'd chip in too as I've used PPH on and off. I charge the higher end of the scale for writing in the health sector. I haven't had any problems, get paid on time and have made a fair amount. Upwork is similar if you're looking at writing - it all takes time and persistence though. I've found good proposals are the key - it's worth taking your time with them.

fewgroats

Peopleperhour seems better tailored for the freelancer than Upwork, as with the latter the client is usually quoted the fee minus the contribution for the site. I suppose the client would tend to expect to pay what they are quoted though.

SouthUKMan

Seeing as this thread has been revived, I thought I would update my thoughts on PPH. After four or so years of being an on / off active seller on PPH, I have come to the conclusion that unless a) you have a lot of time and patience on your hands to bid for a lot of jobs, or b) you are prepared to accept the sad reality that most buyers only want to pay 'less than market rates' and that most sellers will prostitute themselves to win some work, or c) your skill set is reasonably unique and you can charge a fair sum of money because of it....PPH simply is not worth it.

In my experience, there is nearly always someone (or usually many people!) who will undercut you when bidding for the majority of jobs on PPH. I know my worth and I know there are clients in the non-PPH world that are willing to pay a fair rate for my skills. I will therefore not undervalue my time simply because most others undervalue theirs. Also, the very small handful of more specialist jobs that I have landed have been so few and far between that on reflection it really wasn't worth my while investing so many hours searching for the jobs and bidding for them in the first place!

Yes, PPH can earn you some pocket money - but for me it is simply way too much hassle for too little reward. I'm out. Permanently.

tdavid88

Nice, Ill check it out, thank you for sharing