what the FUCK?

Make some sense. First, they can earn money. Second, it's an incentive not to spam potential clients. Third, they want to eliminate those who don't really win contracts anyway and produce nothing but noise.

@Fast-Nop on the surface that might make sense, but if you are a top rated freelancer, nothing of those issues affects you, I can tell you that first hand. I never had an issue not getting picked as my profile stands out and with some recent changes I believe even gets a higher rank on the clients overview. It's really just a money grab, especially because they already ban 'noisy trash'.

@JoshBent the problem with noisy trash is that they only can ban that after a certain number of tries. Here, such a member will have to pay for it from the beginning.

Sure, it would be nicer if top rated folks could go free, but if $5 per month is actually true, that's not much. Dunno what else they are already charging though.

But the nicest thing is that this will be most expensive exactly for the kind of people that are least welcome, and that's quite a brilliant move.

@Fast-Nop I could easily spent 40 bucks too, yet I'd rather spend it on anything else but yet another fee in the chain, they charge their fee on everything that goes through them, which adds up quite a lot at times.

@Fast-Nop I agree. It's pretty brilliant.

For freelancers this is great, now as a hiring manager or project manager I know that you are serious when you are willing to pay a couple of cents to bid.

Means more people likely to use Upwork as bid spam is just such a cunt I avoid freelancer sites on purpose

@seraphimsystems you just know spammers will just create organizational accounts and share the fee or just share an account, it won't eliminate that fact, just yet again: cash for the platform.