I thought it was time we give an update as to what we’ve thought about using RentACoder (RAC) to keep us busy when work contracted directly through our site is slow. We have been on RAC since we started nearly three months and the experiences have been a mixed bag of both good and bad.
On positive side of things, we’ve maintained a 9.95 rating after completing over 61 jobs. Because of our high rating and customer satisfaction, BlueLayerMedia was given an award as a TopCoder by RAC. Additionally, we have had an opportunity to work on a few very large projects and work with some very good people.
My feelings overall toward RAC are divided. They do have an excellent business model….for themselves. There really is nothing for them to do outside of mediation (we’ll talk about that more later) and approving new jobs. I would assume the new jobs are reviewed by staff member before posting, but from what I’ve seen there are no standards as to what is posted. I saw a job posted where someone wanted a ‘coder’ to remove a blog post from someone else’s blog. Outside of hacking the blog every other person out there, including non-technical people would immediately see that is an impossibility. It took me sending them a message to have job removed.
As I mentioned before, RAC has an arbitration process which allows a buyer and coder to try and resolve their differences first, between themselves and if that is unsuccessful with the help of an arbitrator. We’ve had to use the arbitrators only on two occasions and in both incidents, I was left with the impression that RAC was more likely to side with the buyer rather than the coder. If you think about it, it does make more business sense. They need the buyers to keep posting jobs in order to keep their percentage coming in.
The first time using an arbitrator we were hired to install a script. A couple days in to the project and we noticed the script was pirated. Doing what we thought was the right thing, we notified RAC and one would assume the buyer’s account would have been suspended or some type of action taken against him. This wasn’t the case. In the end we were both admonished not to use/install pirated software which just boggled the mind. It seemed there was a great deal of a lack of common sense.
Lastly, selecting jobs with “fix my site to 100%” can be a never ending nightmare for a coder. Once a job is accepted and price agreed upon, if the dynamics of the job change, there is no re-negotiating of the price. If you bid $25 because you thought the job would be a simple fix and it turns to be an utter disaster, there is no wiggle room at all, without going in to mediation. If you’re lucky and the buyer agrees to self mediate you’re lucky. If they press for a arbitrators involvement, you are guaranteed to lose because you did not comply with the original bid to fix their site to “100%”. Also, once a job is marked complete by a coder it can stay in that open status until a buyer closes it and accepts 100% of your work. If they never respond to you, your only recourse is to contact an arbitrator and wait for weeks on end for it to be resolved.
I pulled this off of a recently opened job: “have some simple PHP tweeks needing to be done on two sites. VERY BASIC STUFF…. must be able to do the work now!” This is all the information that is provided and from here you have two choices. Either post a message and ask for more details and hopefully receive a response or post a bid and hope that ‘very basic’ truly is. You can see by this example how easily it would be to get stuck in a losing situation if you’re the coder.
One of the few positives about RAC is they use an escrow service. Once a bid is agreed upon between buyer and coder, the buyer must place the funds that were agreed upon in to an escrow service before work starts. This prevents coders from doing work and never getting paid.
Remember in the beginning how I said RAC has an excellent business model for themselves? Here’s why. They charge a significant fee to jobs that are done via their site. The most laughable is when a buyer posts a $5.00 job and RAC’s fee is $3.00. Leaving a whopping $2.00 for a coder. The fee they charge is a based on a percentage and on one of the larger jobs we did, netted them nearly $1000.00 in fees…..for no work on their end at all. Pretty nifty huh? Unfortunately, this leads to us and I’m sure other coders having to increase their fees to compensate for the overpriced RAC fee.
People looking for coders to do work for them should be very selective. There are many, many distrustful people that will take your money and run. Take the time to research your coder, the work they’ve done in the past and find out what others had to say about them as well.
In order to offer our clients a net of safety we employ a 50/50 method which is commonly used by most freelancers. 50% payment upfront and remaining 50% after completion.
If you’re interested in seeing what we can do for you, feel free to contact us here!
