Upwork is a fantastic site for finding and working with freelancers. I’ve hired using Upwork for years and have always refused to go outside of Upwork for the relationship.

Today, while chatting with a prospective contractor Upwork Messages misinterpreted my giving of time available as a phone number and menacingly warned me that so much as giving out contact information violates their terms of service.

Giving out any contact information whatsoever is a material breach of the terms of service:

You acknowledge and agree that a violation of this Section 7.2 is a material breach of the Terms of Service and your Account may be permanently suspended for such violations.

And those violations can incur a “Conversion Fee” that ranges from $1,000 – $50,000 per relationship. Moreover, Upwork says that they are permitted to charge your payment method on file this fee automatically.

You may opt out of the obligations in Section 7.1 [by paying] Upwork a Conversion Fee which is a minimum of $1,000 USD and up to $50,000 USD for each Upwork Relationship…

The Conversion Fee may be calculated differently for Upwork Relationships when the Client is an Enterprise Client if the Enterprise Client contract with Upwork provides for different terms.

To learn more about the Conversion Fee or how to pay it visit our Help Center here.

…if Upwork determines that you have violated Section 7, it may (a) charge your Payment Method the Conversion Fee (including interest) if permitted by law or send you an invoice for the Conversion Fee (including interest), which you agree to pay within 30 days…

You agree that the Conversion Fee is 13.5% of the estimated earnings over a twelve (12) month period, which is calculated by taking the Hourly Rate (defined below) and multiplying it by 2,080…

So a $10/hr contract could be $2,808.

Compliance concerns? Upwork makes it clear in section 8 that’s your problem, not theirs.

You are solely responsible for creation, storage, and backup of your business records. 

If you need to keep copies of certain records by law you will need to copy and paste or screenshot messages with your freelancers, as Upwork doesn’t have an export feature and they’ll fine you if you communicate directly with the freelancer using your systems that already capture these communications.

I understand the reasoning behind this and I’m not opposed to Upwork protecting their business model but this is insane. Arguably I’ve broken the TOS everytime I’ve invited a freelancer to a Git repository, even though that is de facto way of sharing code.