PeoplePerHour is a website that connects small businesses with freelance workers from across the internet to help them complete small projects quickly and affordably.
According to PeoplePerHour.com, thousands of small businesses use them to hire remote, freelance workers to complete small projects, or just to work for a few hours a week. They claim this allows small businesses to stay flexible.
PeoplePerHour says this benefits small businesses because they can create virtual teams of people across the country – or even internationally – “without the red tape, cost, and bureaucracy of traditional employment.”
They have seven main categories of projects: IT/Programming, Marketing/Sales, Design, Admin/Secretarial, Writing/Translation, Accounting/Legal, or Other. Each category is broken into smaller, more specific categories so workers can something that works for them.
Both businesses and workers can register at PeoplePerHour.com for free. The website does take a small fee from workers, however, when they successfully book a job.
Do you have any experience with PeoplePerHour? If so, please leave a review below.
Good customer support, quick verefication of payments documents, quick money transfer to payment account. Hopefully in the future the site will maintain its high level!
If I can suggest some improvements,
1. I still cannot get the android app on my phone. I would like to be able to access everything with an application, it might also be possible to use the website but I would like to have direct notifications. If I search for the app right now, it's just saying that it's not available in my country.
2. When I hand in proposals, I'm often told that my price would be too low. It might be possible, that some people intentionally quote prices that are way too high in the beginning.
My prices are usually calculated from my normal fee, only giving small discounts. From the amount of jobs I am actually getting I can be quite sure that my prices are not too low.
Nikolay
Nikolay
The issue that jumps out at me is that this poor guy’s account was deactivated with money inside that he had earned, and PPH are not going to give him his money. It never happened to me but there are so many reports of accounts of long time users being suddenly deactivated and funnily enough usually when a big job has just been completed and there is a lot of money there. PPH either says that the user has violated terms and conditions but refuses to explain which terms and conditions exactly have been violated, or they say that the user has failed security checks – this is ridiculous because security checks should be completed before the account is approved if PPH is that concerned about it, by the time the user has been working and earning money it is too late to do security checks and say oh actually no you can’t work on here – he already has. OK deactivate the account if there is a valid reason, but, give the guy his money, anything else is blatant thuggery.
My email address is [email protected].
I'm curious like many others if they credited you all the monies they owed to you in your old account or not.
Thank you,
Baha Abhari
My reasons are in detail under his review, if interested.
AVOID THEM or PRESSURE THEM UNTIL THEY CHANGE.
This is Faryad. Thank you for your sympathy, your kind words, and your great comments. I do appreciate it.
We moved to a new location and they gave us access again. It is a long story. I don't know why, but couldn't edit or update my below comment.
May I have your email address please? I want to stay in touch with you if possible.
Best regards,
Faryad
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.
I think they missed the opportunity to be leaders of standing up to the unfair trade sanctions & discrimination against Iranian people, against Iranian civilians like you, who believed what they said, but instead of fighting it because they knew you that you are for real, they exploited an already unfair burden for their favor, against you.
My introduction to pph was through a guy in California, who by attaching a converter to his computer acting he was logging in from UK.
-My first hourly bought, claimed he has finished cleaning up my hack side, after my payment, I sent him a screen print of my email from my website host stating my hacked site needs to be cleaned, he said he is going to work on it.,....
- My 2nd and third hourlies never followed up, I was told I have been credited 90%, but money is not back to my credit card, but in my wallet and I can buy other hourlies with it.
For all of us who are living in west, it is easy, I called my credit card company & I will be credited for my last two incident, & even the first incident, if I find it in my statements, instead of going through their unfair policies and procedures.
...... and for you, I am sorry for injustice to you, I get you heard wherever, wherever possible. These petty incidents (!) hurts them too, more than what they imagine.
I will also follow up with my credit card company fraud unit & if I remember this website, I will refer them to above comments too.
Question;
Why don't you start a similar company from Iran with better customer service & better ratings, with your friends and tell the people of the world, regardless of nationality & politics to work with you?
Leaving these people behind, West also has a lot of good people too, it has entrepreneurs who support other entrepreneurs & activists committed to change status qua.
A suggestion; Look up PTE, (Persian Tech Entrepreneurs) and tell them you want a way to get contracts worldwide & get paid and if they can find a way.
Make Linked in Connections and a group for the cause of Iranian civilians like yourself & connect with Richard Bronson of Virgin Atantic who always supports enterprenuership, Richard Snowden whom should have of lot of brave people around his circles,, Ted Turner of CNN, Julian Asange of Wicki-Leaks I believe West also has Angelina Julies, Warren Buffets, Bill Gates and other great Warriors.
In their circles in social media, are other great people. Your world wide audience in social media is unlimited from taking legal action, (which I am against, unless you find a contingency lawyer), to exposing them until they pay your damages, to finding other supportive people in creating something positive out of this negative experience.
Read your story, and want to comment on it. For some points you are right namely for the legal one. Namely you honestly mentioned your nationality and you have been allowed in, so that cannot be an argument for deactivating your account.
For the proposal credits you are not right, you loose a credit when you bid and changing your mind is absolutely your problem, saying you may not decide what to offer, with an exception, in case the buyer changes the project description, only in that case you should get refund. In case the buyer changes the price, you should not cancel, because your price should be based on your hourly rate and not what the buyer esstimates, you are the professional not the buyer.
You may not blame PPH for pending projects, since it is difficult to assume if the project is delayed on purpose or just the client still cannot decide, with some time limit offcourse.
I am using PPH, I am relatively happy, but I do not rely on them for income, just for extra income, so am not that critical. The only two issues I have, is 1 project resellers, individuals who bid on projects in platform A and sell it in platform B for lower price, and 2, the extreamly low minimum, I think it should go from 7 GBP to say 50 GBP, in order to elliminate the buyers who want lots of work for nothing.
Regards,
Nikolay