They are mulling a release on the stock market (freelancer.com) , and i was also thinking of participating and buying some of their IPO stock , but after I checked my email this week and saw that i got charged $5.89 for nothing from freelancer.com, i changed my mind. I’m no more buying any Shares in freelancer.com if it lists on the stock market and just started looking for alternatives for freelancer to get my freelancing jobs done . Any company that has a sneaky tactic to charge you more and more fees, even while not providing a service can be termed bit off a rip off IMHO.
Not PayPal’s fault … just freelancer taking money outta my paypal
I had to do a bit of further investigation to see why i was charged when i didn’t even use their service in the last month or so. I found out after their last upgrade they actually upgraded my account to the Basic membership rather than the $0 fee account, which is wrong in my opinion , you just cant upgrade an existing no fee account to basic account which automatically starts to charge your account regularly for money when you don’t even use that account. .
If they were fair dinkum they would automatically change all the accounts to the $0 no fees account (rather than basic where users started getting charged suddenly) and then whoever wanted to upgrade could do so themselves.
Result:
I immediately downgraded my freelancer account to $0 fees
and cancelled freelancer authorisation to my paypal account so that they cant force bill me anymore. I can see many people going forward looking for alternatives other than freelancer who are using these kinds of tactics that lets down that trust of users and secondly also increasing and charging quite a hefty fee rapidly for doing transactions with them. They are services out there that charge less than 40 % of what they charge and I will be using them from now on.
I’m not telling that freelancer is not a good service , i have used them for my projects but when they do this kind of stuff it lets down your trust and you are forced to look elsewhere . Let me know if you have been a victim of the same predicament.
UPDATE : EVEN MORE disturbing
I got this email after downgrading … Even more P*** off now
You have successfully downgraded to a free membership. Your membership will remain active until Oct 21, 2013.
Channel
I will have to review my account