[Ethan]

I only heard of it last week, but apparently it’s been around for a few years already and has millions $$$ of funding in San Francisco, why is their marketing so bad?

and their SEO is terrible, look at their profiles: https://contra.com/mendozakate1_hs024wfs

Instead of highlighting your profile and recent reviews and services/gigs you provide, they focus entirely on your example projects. This makes no sense to me, and each project has it’s own URL like: https://contra.com/p/UWscblvX-hashimotive-healthcare-application

And your services tab is separate: https://contra.com/mendozakate1_hs024wfs/services

And then each of your services ALSO has a new URL: https://contra.com/s/Re3gNY2A-uxui-design

I’d be surprised if anyone makes real money on this platform. But a real competitor to Upwork would always be nice…

[Karen]

their homepage is terrible, I didn’t even realize it was for hiring freelancers, why do these platforms try to pretend like they are some world-changing business? it’s a place to hire people for services, just say that!

[Susan]

never heard of Contra, is it for US only?

[Kathleen]

I checked it previously but growth has been slow there are real clients however and less competition

[Diana]

I’m not hating but UI looks women-designed and structure looks third world designed.

[Natalie]

Upwork CEO Hayden Brown… best woman in tech?

[Larry]

https://contra.com/freelance-industry-report-2021/

look at this monstrosity, someone probably spent 3 months of full-time salary putting this together! I mean it’s impressive but also, impressively bloated.

[Kenneth]

Anyone have experience using Contra for freelancing?
byu/Billowyedward630 infreelanceWriters

Top comment was:

I’ve used it for the past year as it’s a nice combination of an aesthetic portfolio site and a way to take bookings without paying fees. Their traffic is definitely lower than UpWork, but also higher end, so I get a more filtered group of clients contacting me through it. They don’t charge any fees/percentage of your earnings for jobs, so I also use it as a link in my emails/blog posts to take bookings and let people see my availability and rates.

Most of the clients I’ve gotten are tech companies/startups because it’s fundamentally not specifically a “writing” platform and my expertise is tech/crypto, but if you’re looking for those kinds of clients it’s great.I use it alongside UpWork, putting the projects I had previously done on my Contra profile to help get jobs there. It’s relatively new so I’d guess they’re planning on introducing paid features down the line, but the no-fees on jobs model makes sense for the higher end market they target (where the ~20% charged by sites like UpWork is a massive portion of your earnings).

Re: the fees, anything with credit cards is going to have the base fee Stripe charges to pay the card networks, but Contra itself doesn’t charge anything. The FAQs mention a fee for instant payouts, but I’ve never paid this on the site and from my experience the payouts have been within 2-3 days. FYI this might be different for non-US freelancers, as payment infrastructure generally is.

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