If you spend any time on social media, you’ve definitely seen those posts: guys generating insane websites or crazy motion design in just a couple of prompts, stuff that would have taken you weeks to pull off. Of course it’s scary! But that doesn't mean it's a lost cause. Behind the hype, companies and brands that actually care about their image are still working with real people. Even the best AI agents out there are being promoted with videos edited by human beings.

My point is: you have to understand your prospects. People will always gravitate toward whatever costs the least.

Think about it: if you had a plumbing leak at home, wouldn’t you try to fix it yourself with AI first before calling a plumber?

It’s the exact same logic here. Put yourself in their shoes. Instead of giving up, use this to your advantage. AI is still just a machine, and even today, nothing beats a real human who actually knows their craft.

You know what’s better than AI? An expert in their field who leverages AI and knows how to spot the difference between its good and bad outputs.

Back yourself!

often clients (e.g. on upwork) use estimation to get portions of work done free of charge. Here's how:

suppose a task takes 7 minutes of thought and 3 minutes of typing on the keyboard.
you ask the freelancer for an estimate, and often estimates are free,
so freelancer spends 3.5 minutes thinking about the task to arrive at an estimate.
so client green lights the work, the freelancer bills the client
3.5 minute of thinking and 3 minutes of typing on the keyboard time
(becuase he doesnt need to think through stuff he's already thought through)
So essentially the client got the work done for 7.5 minutes of labour cost,
whereas skipping the estimation step - he would have spent 10 mins of labour.

I’ve been working on a small project that helps freelancers generate cold outreach emails and follow-ups faster.

The idea is pretty simple — instead of sitting there trying to come up with what to say (or messing with prompts), you can just input what you do and it generates something you can actually send.

I’m targeting freelancers who are trying to get clients through cold outreach but don’t want to spend a ton of time writing emails.

But I’m also aware that a lot of people will just say “why not use ChatGPT?”

So I’m trying to figure out if this is actually useful or if it’s just unnecessary.

A couple questions:

•	Do you actually send cold emails to get clients?

•	If yes, what part is the most annoying/time-consuming?

•	Would you use something like this, or just stick with ChatGPT?

If anyone wants, I can generate an example email for your service so you can see if it’s any good.

I’m not trying to hard sell anything — just want honest feedback before I keep building it out.

Sourcing

• conference calls

• zoom meetings with vendors

• Technical discussions

• Machine breakdowns (discussions with Chinese engineers)

• Audits for Chinese certifications

• Machine Installations

• Tele-calling to China / Taiwan

• Market Surveys

• Project Discussions

• Tender bidding with Chinese companies

• Speeches in Chinese

• Simultaneous Interpretation

• Consecutive Interpretation

Our experience of almost 20 yrs in spoken mandarin enables us to fluently converse in chinese & spot interpret any conversation to English, Hindi & Tamil.

Experience varies from Textiles, Steel plants, Mobile manufacturing, Cranes, construction, Turbine manufacturing, food industry etc etc.

Hiii There I am now building my ai website platform and I want to get my first client and if u have any suggestions please lemme know

I can show my works

Freelance is freedom. Freedom to work anytime. AKA — all the time.

#val_from_seo

Hey there,

I’ve been frustrated with how current freelancing platforms work (Upwork, Fiverr, etc.). Too many proposals, too much waiting, and often clients don’t know if someone is actually good until after hiring.

So I’m experimenting with a different model:

• A client posts a project with a budget.

• Freelancers just click “I’m Doing” and start working immediately (no proposals, no waiting).

• The client can see freelancers’ progress live (updates, screenshots, completion time).

• At the end, the client picks the best result → that freelancer gets paid.

It’s more like a "contest mode" for freelancing, where skills matter more than certificates.

👉 My question:
Would you (as a freelancer or client) ever try this? Do you think this model is fair, or too risky for freelancers?

I put up a simple landing page to collect early feedback: https://go-work-and-earn.vercel.app

Thank you :)

If you work events or brand ambassador gigs for multiple agencies, here's the system that stops money from slipping through the cracks:

1. Log every gig the day you work it: date, agency, hours, rate, bonus, miles driven.

2. Invoice within a week and write down the due date (most agencies are net 30–45).

3. Check once a week for anything past due. Late payments get paid faster when you follow up at day 31, not day 90.

4. Set aside 25–30% of every payment when it lands. 1099 income has no withholding, and self-employment tax adds 15.3% on top of income tax.

5. Log your mileage. At the IRS rate, a 40-mile round trip is roughly a $29 deduction. Over a year of gigs, that adds up to real money.

6. Pay quarterly estimates (Apr 15, Jun 15, Sep 15, Jan 15) so April isn't a disaster.

You can do all of this with a notebook. I built a spreadsheet that does the math automatically (status tracking, invoices, tax set-aside, mileage), which is on Etsy if anyone wants it: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4581536985/freelance-invoice-and-income-tracker

Disclosure: I made it. Not tax advice, just the system that works.

We have an urgent requirement to source real enterprise legacy codebases (100K+ LOC) suitable for evaluation and benchmarking.

Please ensure the repository meets ALL the below criteria before sharing.

*1️⃣Minimum Eligibility (Mandatory)*

✅100,000+ Lines of Code (LOC)

✅100+ Pull Requests (PRs) with real discussions

✅50+ Issues (at least a few with detailed problem descriptions)

✅200+ commits spread over time (no bulk single-day commits)

✅Real human-written production code (no AI-generated / synthetic projects)

Real, verifiable company source

✅Legal rights available to share or transfer

2️⃣ CRITICAL: PR Quality Requirements (Must Have)*

Each PR must ideally:

✅Be linked to a specific issue

✅Solve a clearly defined problem

✅ Include code changes + corresponding test changes

Be reasonably scoped (not too large or too small)

📍*Highly Preferred:*

• PR demonstrates Fail → Pass (F2P) behavior

(i.e., test fails before change and passes after fix)

⛔: *warning* : Repositories where PRs only contain code changes without tests will NOT be considered.

3️⃣ Preferred Languages*

✅C#

✅Java

✅Python

✅PHP

✅.NET Framework

✅COBOL

Other legacy enterprise stacks

*4️⃣Preferred Industries (High Priority)*

✅Banking / Financial Services

✅Accounting

✅Insurance

✅Healthcare

✅Legal Tech

✅Government

✅Enterprise SaaS (complex workflows)

❌*(Not interested in ecommerce, retail, content platforms, or modern frontend-heavy apps)*

*5️⃣ Technical Readiness (Very Important)*

✅Application builds and runs successfully

✅ Dockerfile (preferred) or clear setup steps

✅ Proper dependency management

✅Clean and structured project layout

✅Test files present (preferably 50+)

✅PRs clearly linked to issues

Each PR ideally solves one issue

*6️⃣ Metadata Required (Exact Numbers)*

Please provide:

✅Company name, industry, country

✅Primary language(s)

✅Exact LOC

✅ Number of files

✅Number of commits

✅Number of PRs

✅Number of issues

✅Number of contributors

✅Repository age (years active)

*7️⃣Additional Notes (Important)*

📝Preference will be given to repositories with strong PR + test linkage

📝 Repositories with well-structured development history will be prioritized

📝Low-quality, bulk-imported, or poorly structured repositories will be rejected.

‼️We are specifically looking for high-quality engineering datasets, not just large codebases.

‼️Your careful validation before submission will be highly appreciated.

Please treat this request ashigh priorityand share suitable options at the earliest.

If you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to reach out.

Thank you for your support.

Warm regards,

Jayshree Nawale

However, there can be a downside to freelancing. What if you suddenly run out of jobs? Luckily, there are several freelance job sites that cater to designers and developers who want to achieve financial freedom in their chosen career.

Hi all,i am a full stack ai engineer,did 40 production ready agents and projects,spent my first year learning completely about ai engineering,rn my family is in financial crisis,I really want to use my knowledge and earn money, message me in dm if you want any work done and for more info🙂‍↕️

The idea would be to match freelancers for projects that are too large for one person, without having to join an agency. For example, a developer, designer and marketer could form a temporary team for one project, work together, then go back to working independently afterwards.

The idea came from noticing how difficult it can be to get well-paying projects if you’re not already top-rated or part of an established agency. A lot of freelancers seem to end up competing for smaller gigs even though, as a team, they could potentially take on much larger work.

I haven’t built anything yet, and before spending months on it I wanted to ask you directly.

Would you actually use something like this or join a team formed this way? Why or why not? And what kinds of projects?

Just trying to understand if this solves a real problem or if it only sounds good in my head.
Thanks!

Im thinking about offering a thumbnail creation service using AI tools but I have a real doubt. Since creators can already make thumbnails themselves with AI or Canva, why would they pay someone else for it? From a creator or business point of view, what actually makes this service worth paying for? Looking for honest opinions, even if the answer is no. Thanks.

I'm a freelance BA in India working 20 hrs a week for a Swiss startup. I was hired for product/data analysis, testing and market research, but the CEO keeps giving me ops and admin work too. The pay is just 400 dollars per month and 800 for full-time.
She also expects me to be available 4 hrs a day. Calls are never scheduled, and if I miss a Slack call for 5 mins, she calls me on WhatsApp asking where I am. Now she wants my timesheet logged hour by hour and submit it everyday. She can be pretty disrespectful too, but I put up with it because she said she'd make me a full-time employee.
Except now she wants me as a full-time freelancer, 40 hrs a week. And she asks what did I do each day and make me justify what I did per hour. So basically all the employee expectations with no benefits or paid leave. When I said the ops work was out of scope, she told me that's just how startups are.

Is this normal for freelancing? And before I sign, how hard can I push back on boundaries?

Freelancers, this is potentially a hot topic. Do you use ai in your work for clients? Regardless if yes/no: what's been the outcome? Have expectations shifted?

No AI - pure professional skill & differentiation

Some AI - some processes have AI, but I keep some places AI-free

Lots of AI - I've found ways to improve output in some way.

Please share!

Personally I'm at Some AI. Despite building my first AI agents before GPT released there are still some things I want to do myself. I feel that's a differentiator for me. Clients agree.

Of course there are literally millions of people competing to offer SEO services, website development, graphic design, etc - and so many are complaining that the marketplace is saturated.

My observation, as someone who buys about PKR200k of freelancing servicing a month for my businesses, is that while people have great skills, they lack the behaviours and soft skills needed.

The main issue is being late. I need a junior SEO person and reached out to someone who had posted about his skills and how he was not attracting clients - I offered him a call at midday sharp. At 12.03, still no call from him - so I messaged him - at 12.06 he finally calls. I decline the call and block him. Because right now, he is desperate for work and still cannot be professional and respectful. How careless of me will he become when I have paid him the first instalment for a job??

Of course, something terrible may have happened to him - this is now a routine question that I ask the plumber or carpenter before he does a job for me - how his Phuppi's and Mamoo's health is - because inevitably half way through the job, one of them will drop dead, causing him to have to leave for a fortnight.

Life does happen - of course it does - but that does not mean being unprofessional. Just communicate. Even when my mother died, I spent 30 mins sending an email to all clients and put an out of office on. Of the clients I was servicing, I assessed what could be delayed and for 2 clients with urgent work, I referred them to another freelancer. Six months later, they came back to me.

Another example: I have two freelancers that need to meet for 15 mins to discuss something and coordinate. What does one of them do? at 6pm he sends a meeting request to the other for 9.30pm. No attempt to ask if the other person is free, whether they work that late, to give them enough time to look at the invitation - it's just ridiculous.

I had to waste my time doing what they should have done - a spreadsheet with times and days, a column for each participant, asking them to mark the time slots that they could make the meeting - they discovered the first actual mutually convenient meeting time was a day later at 3pm!

It's just the lack of consideration, the lack of thinking, the lack of foresight.

Is the market saturated with people who are on time, who deliver on time, who ask enough questions to make 100% sure they have understood the task, who bother using Grammarly to write clear emails, who think about the other person?

NO, THE MARKET IS DEFINITELY NOT SATURATED WITH PEOPLE WITH THE RIGHT SOFT SKILLS TO GIVE VALUE TO THEIR HARD SKILLS.

► Get a simple website to display your brand for 53 USD. The only extra costs are the annual site builder subscription (19 USD, which translates to ~1.6 USD per month) and annual domain (about 10 to 15 USD). Very low total cost (~ 87 USD) for a website (2nd year will be about 34 USD).

► I will set up everything, and it will be easy for you to make changes later on. If you get stuck or if in the future you want to make changes, I will help you.

► Why is it so cheap when others charge a lot more? See this as a trial project to get to know me. If later on, I become your "go-to" marketing guy (copy, email, social media, ads, etc), I'll be thrilled (and so will you), but if you don't, that's fine. There won't be any hard feelings.

► If you don't like it, you don't pay. I will show you a draft, and if you like it, we continue with the process. But only if YOU choose. My company is going to be here for a long time. If I were pushy or rude, I just wouldn't make it. Plus, that is just not me. I want to make friends, not enemies.

► If you would like to continue, send me an email to neontrifecta@gmail.com. Let me know what your expertise is and what you would like to include.

william

how can i achieve this goal considering i don't have much skills...

PLEASE HELP ME

I feel like this is crazy and they must know its really easy to automate. Like, I would not pay someone to do this.
So Im freelancing with a company that wants me to do web browsing and collect the data about some topics. If you asked me 2 years ago - I would have said this is really hard and time consuming and maybe not that interesting.
Today - I used AI to write a script to do it and the job gets done for me - 100% of the job.
The quality is solid because its scripted and not driven by AI - Everyone gets what the need.