Hans doesn’t like my pricing model.
Hi John Jonas,
to be honest, I am not a big fan of your pricing model, or maybe I am not totally understanding it. Please let me know if I got things wrong.
In my understanding, you’re offering a “free” tier – where you can write job postings, but you cannot hire anyone or talk to anyone, so how is this free tier useful if you cannot hire anyone or even talk to any of the applications?
Then you have a couple of paid tiers where the cheapest one is $69/month (I am personally not going for a year commitment without any experience first on a month-to-month basis). And as I understand, this is just a membership fee for being able to hire someone or talk to someone. So if I am e.g. 3 months not using a worker, I am stilling paying $69/month.
Why don’t you use a pricing model where you get paid a percentage of the hours paid to the Filippino worker? In my opinion, this leads to a better trust between your service and your customers. Because you get paid when your customers get results (=hiring a worker). With your pricing model, you get paid independently of the results of the customer. Again, if I’m wrong here, let me know.
I have used Upwork a couple times in the past, and here you don’t have to pay a monthly fee just to be a member of Upwork. Same with Udemy for online courses. You don’t need to pay Udemy a monthly fee just to be a member.
Again, I am all ears for an explanation of why you are using your type of pricing model.
At the moment, I am just interested in learning more about VAs and part of that was signing up to your platform and finding out which workers/skills were out there. When I found out about your monthly subscription fee, it kind of took me by surprise and made me think of other possible solutions to get VAs.
My personal preference is to just hire a VA and pay the VA the hourly rate, without any additional monthly subscription costs attached to it.
Best regards,
Hans
GREAT!
Your personal preference is exactly what we offer. You pay the VA with no salary markups, and no monthly fees.
The paid tiers (Pro and Premium accounts) are essentially contact access to the database.
You need to be upgraded to hire a Filipino worker, but you don’t have to stay subscribed to keep working with them.
You can cancel immediately and still be upgraded for the remaining days of your 30-day subscription. This way you ensure you don’t get rebilled.
If the person you’ve hired doesn’t work and you’re still within the 30 days, you’ll still be able to get in touch with your other candidates.
You can stay in the free tier for as long as you like and resubscribe if you need to hire more people. Your account will still be there when you’re ready to hire again. You won’t lose any data when you stop paying us the monthly fee.
We chose this business model because we see that this is more fair for everybody involved.
Why?
I don’t feel comfortable taking a percentage of the workers’ salaries.
They don’t like it. You don’t like it.
They need that money to survive.
The Upwork Model
Let’s say you’ve hired a Filipino worker, and you’re paying them $500 a month. Every time you pay them, Upwork takes 10%.
$50 isn’t much…for you! But for a Filipino worker, that $50 can buy them
– a week’s worth of groceries or
– pay for their utilities or
– buy their parents’ antihypertensive medication
– their kid’s monthly tuition.
To take that much every time they get their salary just feels unethical.
They know about it and they hate it. It’s waste.
So what happens at Upwork? Workers raise their salaries. 10, 20, 30%. They have to because Upwork is taking fees. And because Upwork work is temporary.
Great for Upwork…they get 10% of a higher salary. Now you’re paying $700/month for the same person you’d pay $500 at OnlineJobs.ph. Upwork is now taking $70…every month!
You’re paying $200 more for what was supposed to be “free” since Upwork didn’t charge you up front.
This is the reason OnlineJobs.ph has done so well over the years: We don’t take a cut of salaries as Upwork does.
Once you’ve paid someone $700 via Upwork, you’ve already paid Upwork more than you would have paid to hire the same person through OnlineJobs.ph.
When I started OnlineJobs.ph I built what I wanted to use. I didn’t build what would make me the most money. Taking a cut of salaries would make me the most money. But it would suck for you.
We focus on you hiring staff. Your way. At the actual market price, not an artificially marked up price.
Once you’ve hired a full-time staff, you’re done paying us until you’re ready to hire another. You pay exactly the amount the worker gets.
It’s fair.
It’s ethical.
Both you and the person you hire feel good about it.
Also, did you know Upwork charges the workers every time they apply? Taking even more money from people who need it.
We’ve been in business since 2009 and have grown every month since we launched. Every day, I see people coming to OnlineJobs.ph from Upwork because “free” from Upwork isn’t cheaper than $69 at OnlineJobs.
John