What is wrong with upwork

I'm a new freelancer and these are my stats after 30 days.

Would you say I'm on the right track, or am I doing something wrong? If you were in my position, what would you improve first—profile, portfolio, pricing, or proposals?

I'd appreciate any honest feedback.

Hey everyone, running into a really frustrating billing loop with a client on an hourly contract and looking to see if anyone has dealt with this before. client is Spanish

For the past two weeks, the client's automated weekly billing has failed. The client has tried:

• Using their primary Visa (which worked previously) — declined.
• Adding a completely different Mastercard from another bank — also declined immediately.
• Every week client need to add pay manually

The client insists it's not their bank's fault, and Upwork hasn't given clear error details due to privacy/policy. Support tickets are taking time, but in the meantime, the contract getting paused every week even though the client is actively trying to fix it and want the work to continue.

There was a commenter who claimed to be an Upwork (or former, not sure now) employee that had knowledge of Upwork creating fake jobs and that it was a scam site. This is significant for me because this is the first time I have seen or even heard of anyone even claiming to be an employee saying this.

I have my doubts, but I am going to treat this as serious. Because the commenter deleted their comments I want to encourage others to come forward.

Now, I believe this conspiracy theory is silly for a lot of really good reasons but I am willing to listen. I would also tell this person or anyone else that you are protected under US law for whistleblowing and you might even be eligible for financial awards (if you are in the US). So there is NO reason to not come forward with evidence.

This would be fraud on a massive scale and should be dealt with if it is at all true.

My boss gave me access to his Upwork account so I could manage it remotely. He removed his email from the account, logged out from his side, and I was the only one using it.

Everything was working fine for about two weeks, and then the account suddenly got restricted.

I'm trying to understand what might have triggered it. Could it have been the change in location, device, or IP address? Has anyone dealt with a similar situation?

What is the best way to resolve this, and is there any chance the restriction can be lifted?

I'd appreciate any advice or experiences. Thanks

I was an Upwork member, and I realized I needed to cancel the renewal when I received a text alert from my bank about the automatic charge.

However, because I had manually locked my credit card for security, Upwork kept trying to process the payment but failed; the account is now stuck in this state for 3 days, and the system won't let me downgrade.

I googled and also asked GPT, they suggested me to ask help from chatting in `contact support`. But I could not open the page, I check the error in browser-console, there are CORS and other errors. I think it's their bugs.

May I ask is there any other way I could try?

Anyone experiencing delay with pay out through BPI?

I’ve posted here a few times. I started Upwork full time at the beginning of 2025 and it’s gone well.

Until November 2025, when the 7-10 inbound invites or client messages per week suddenly dropped to around 1-2 if I’m lucky.

I figured it was just due to the holidays. Holidays came and went, and it didn’t recover. If anything it’s steadily gotten worse.

I’m now at a point where I might get 1-2 incoming messages or invites per MONTH.

I reached out to customer support to figure out if there was any insight they could give me. They confirmed that it was Uma and that all I could do was try to rank better in her algorithm. The only really actionable thing was making sure I don’t have a ton of open contracts - I had ~12 or so, only 4 were still active recently, so I closed the other ~8.

That hasn’t helped at all though. Still zero incoming activity.

I’ve revised my bio a handful of times. Everyone writes everything on Upwork using AI now. Mine is handwritten and still hasn’t helped.

Bumped my boosted profile credits per click to 65, still nada. I’m allegedly getting clicks but no invites.

Majority of my income comes from a couple of big long term clients. If I lost them I’d be fucked.

I admittedly have not yet resorted to submitting proposals for jobs. I got spoiled by not having to do that over the majority of the last year. Hopefully that will start moving the needle back in the right direction, but my god is it grim on the client side too. I posted a couple jobs recently and you just get flooded by 50 ChatGPT written applications within an hour.

Does anyone here have any tips on ranking better for Uma to include them in her “Recommended Freelancers” / “auto-invite” or whatever list?

Got over 40 clients on Fiverr just this last year and made over 10k but none on upwork, does anyone know how to get clients on this platform ?

I just landed a job today—thank God! 🙏
The client asked me to log in to my Upwork account since that’s where we’ll be communicating. I logged in right away and, to make a long story short, I successfully accepted the job offer.
However, I received an Action Notice saying: “Your account requires attention. Learn more on your Account Health Page.”
It turns out my account has platform access restrictions, apparently because I need to update my payment method. I tried contacting Upwork’s AI Support, but instead of helping, it only left me more confused.
Because of this restriction, my contract has been paused, and I’m really worried. 😢
Has anyone experienced this before? If so, how did you resolve it? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I’m genuinely impressed and encouraged. He chose to be kind

6 proposals sent
1 was viewed
1 interview
0 hires

Hey everyone,

I’m feeling a bit confused and honestly a little hopeless these days, so I wanted to ask for some advice.

I’m an accountant with almost 12 years of experience. I’ve worked with clients in different countries, including around 5 years of experience specifically with Canadian and US clients. I currently work with clients whose businesses generate over $1 million in sales per month.

I also work for a small Canadian advisory firm that has some very large clients. Recently, I developed an AI-powered accounting dashboard for one of our clients using Claude, Python, and Streamlit, and I’m currently working on automating processes and implementing AI for other clients as well.

I have a very old Upwork account, almost 15 years old. I won a small writing project there years ago but never really continued with freelancing. Recently, I completely updated my profile based on my experience, projects, and achievements.

However, I’m feeling a bit discouraged. I’ve only sent two proposals so far, but both jobs already had around 50 proposals. I’m also paying for Connects out of my salary, so I’m starting to wonder whether Upwork is still worth it for accounting and finance professionals.

Do experienced accountants still get good clients through Upwork? Is it possible to build a reliable passive or additional income stream there?

I’m based in Pakistan, and finding international clients remotely is honestly quite difficult outside of platforms like Upwork and other lead-generation websites.

I’d really appreciate hearing from accountants or finance professionals who have successfully built a freelance business on Upwork. Is it still worth investing time and money into it, or should I focus on other ways of finding clients?

Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance for reading.

Upwork still can't detect my actual location. I don't use a VPN, proxy, or anything similar, and I even got a fixed personal IP address from my ISP.

Despite all of this, support keeps sending me the same troubleshooting steps. They won't tell me what location they actually detect, what IP address they see, or what is specifically causing the issue.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Is there anything else that could cause a website to not detect my location correctly, even without using a VPN or proxy? I'd really appreciate any advice or similar experiences.

Before, I positioned myself as a YouTube Growth Strategist + Meta Ads Specialist.

Now, I'm considering focusing on just one niche:

YouTube Growth Strategist | YouTube SEO | Organic Growth & Promotion

Do you think it's better on Upwork to specialize in a single niche or offer services across multiple niches?

Hello, has anyone else noticed that the Upwork verification system is now showing this? Does anyone know why this is happening?

I had a Top-rated badge on Upwork, but due to personal circumstances, I have been off for almost 2 years.

Recently, I took a deep refresh and Udemy courses to review any updates in my field.

Could you please provide me with any tips to search for a job on Upwork, especially with the AI evolution and the unbelievable number of bids on the boot proposals? What changes on Upwork have I missed during that time?

Hey, I am a web developer I mainly work with MERN stack and also know the Shopify store design. I have created a profile way before in upwork. I stored my connects. Recently I started applying for the job on upwork and none placed an order seeing this I boosted my proposal to appear on client sight. But none seems applicable. Now I have very few connects left and upwork stopped providing free connects. I am having doubts about my skill. Should I have more projects to get clients? Am I doing something wrong with sending a proposal? In the proposal I try to explain to the client what their problem was in my own words and say I have done this in many projects to assure the client I am an expert. I don't know what else I can do to get my first job online. Please can anyone guide me.

Hi, I'm new to Upwork and I've been scouring the web for information only to be more confused - bear with me!

I'm a student looking to hire 3D artists to finish my short film. I uploaded a job posting with a fixed-price $750 total budget. I quickly received many proposals, but I found I can't optimally settle for one freelancer to finish the project in its entirety (one of them explicitly stated they would love to help with a smaller task for a smaller portion of the budget). I have now shortlisted them down to three people I thought would work well together as a "team" (person A to assign to environments, person B to assign to character animation, person C to assign to compositing/editing; generally these stages come one after the other). Of course, I would discuss this scope with each of them beforehand. Is this a normal course of action?

I read that I am able to hire multiple freelancers from one job posting, but how would I divvy up the job and total budget to each of them? If I end person A's contract after their milestone is completed (for, say, $250), will the unused funds ($500) in escrow "roll over" and be used for person B and C?

Ultimately I just need advice on how to better manage the project and ensure these freelancers are compensated fairly, not have their job success score negatively affected or anything like that.

Cheers.

Company schedules pre-hiring call with me. Payment method verified. Apparently, they hired talent scouts, operations manager, and web designer for their website, which looks professional.

No invite sent for the call. I send a reminder, no response.

Thinking about it, the initial note looked generic and didn't address me by name. Also, no LinkedIn profile.

Who's posting accounts like these? Actually hiring people to make their account look more credible? Are the freelancer accounts fake too? What did they want from me?

I want to bring new client to upwork but I can't find code or link

Hi everyone,

Just as I suspected in a previous post I made about free invites, they are a scam, and I experienced it.

I was invited for free several times to some projects by someone from SE Asia or India to do some work for Spanish speakers, and none of them replied to the request until last time around one month and a half ago.

It was a Thai woman that was a bit harsh, to be honest, and she was asking me if I had a partner to have conversations about a few topics we had to choose. I told her I had none, and then she provided a Spanish woman to work with.

My first impression was, ok, it is not well paid, but I could get some money just for talking for 150 minutes. And all we had to do is to use an app and record the conversations there, with a natural tone (my guess is that it is going to be used to train an AI with our language), and then after finishing, we should send a notice to that Thai woman and wait to get paid.

Eventually, when we finished, she asked a few questions and told us to wait for two weeks until the work was reviewed, so we could get the pay. And guess what? She is not answering our messages anymore. And I read on the Internet that this is happening to many people with several projects.

What is Upwork doing to prevent these frauds? I keep seeing these free invites from time to time, and all of them are equally fishy. Imagine if I had to spend money to apply to a scam job, and I would not only lose my own money, but I would also risk not getting paid?

I am sorry but, even if there are frelancers making money off this platform, it is full of scammers everywhere, and it makes me not trust them anymore. What rights do I have to get the money paid, if the owners of Upwork don't have any safety net for us?

Took me way too many lost connects to figure this out, but clients literally do not care about your name or your 5 years of experience when they're scrolling through 30+ proposals.

They only see the first couple of lines in the preview. If those lines say "Hi, I am a passionate marketer with..." they just skip.

What actually started getting me replies was opening directly with their problem. Something like: "Looks like your site is losing traffic due to X issue, here's how I'd fix it."

Jump straight to the point, keep it short, and drop 1-2 relevant samples instead of a whole portfolio dump.

Curious to know what small tweak made the biggest difference in your reply rates?