I have had bad experiences with PeoplePerHour, and I would recommend that people approach this freelancing platform with caution.

The biggest problem I have experienced with PPH is one that I realised only recently, and it may be an issue that leads me to abandon this platform for good.

Although I am currently using a number of different platforms to get freelance work, PPH is different in that it - as a company - has two different revenue streams: one from the buyer when the company takes a cut of project revenues and one from the seller when they purchase proposal credits (when their monthly allowance of free credits runs out).

In the past, I have submitted proposals for a number of different projects that were all focusing on one particular type of service. There were usually quite a few people bidding for these projects, but I thought I would just keep going until I had enough projects under my belt. But then something came to my attention….

Practically all of the projects generally followed the same characteristics:

• The descriptions were all short and fairly vague.
• The overwhelming majority of them were supposedly from the United Kingdom but the names of the buyers were almost invariably Asian.
• The proposals for these projects never seemed to be accepted by the buyer and the projects themselves would just expire after a month.

This went on for quite a while and is still going on right now, which has lead me to the conclusion that the majority of project submissions were fake and were created to speed up the rate at which proposal credits were spent. This has meant that keen sellers would have to spend cash on purchasing additional credits to continue bidding for projects.

Other problems with PPH are also ongoing, including the fact that, in some sub-sectors of the platform, a small number of sellers seem to win the lion’s share of bids and that whatever projects are left over are fought for by non-European participants who can charge next to nothing for their work.

All in all, I would recommend that anyone thinking of using PPH for extra revenue should only use the free proposal credits to bid for projects. After three months, if you haven’t generated a small amount of steady revenue, I would strongly recommend going elsewhere.

Hope this helps.