A social media freelancer has sent a quote, and the brand now has to decide whether to hire through a marketplace or pay the freelancer directly. The marketplace route adds a fee somewhere. What is less obvious is how many fees there are, who pays each one, and what the brand gets in return.
This is a fee explainer built on one fully sourced example and a dated check, not a ranking of marketplaces. Everything stated about Freelancer.com below comes from its own fees page, fetched on 2026-10-04.
Two fees on one job, and only one shows on the brand’s invoice
Most coverage of marketplace fees is written for freelancers, as the cut taken out of earnings. A brand reading it can come away thinking the fee is someone else’s problem. It is not that simple, because a marketplace can charge both sides of a job.
A client-side fee is added to what the brand pays. A freelancer-side commission is deducted from what the freelancer receives. The brand sees the first on its own invoice and never sees the second. A freelancer who knows a commission will come out of the payout may raise the quote to absorb it. That is an inference, not a behaviour documented by any platform, and the brand cannot tell from the quote alone whether it has happened.
So the reader’s moment is specific: a quote is in hand, the number on it may or may not already contain the freelancer’s fee, and the marketplace’s client-side fee would be extra on top.
Freelancer.com: what its own fee page charges each side
Freelancer.com publishes both sides of its fee schedule on one page, https://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges, which returned HTTP 200 and readable content when fetched on 2026-10-04.
For employers, the page says that fixed-price projects carry a fee of 3% or $3.00 USD, whichever is greater. The page’s answer on employer fees says this fee is charged at the time the project is awarded, and that if the employer later pays the freelancer more than the original bid, the same 3% applies to the additional payments. Hourly projects carry a 3% fee on each payment made to the freelancer. The page also says the employer may cancel the project from the dashboard for up to seven days after the project has been accepted, for a full refund of the fee. Posting a project and receiving bids is free, and the fee arrives when the project is awarded.
For freelancers, the same page states a fee of 10% or $5.00 USD, whichever is greater, on fixed-price projects, and 10% on hourly projects. That is cited here only as the counterpart to the employer fee, since it is the amount that comes out of the freelancer’s side of the same job.
Contests and service orders work differently from projects. For contests, the page says employers provide funds equal to the total prize when posting, and that there is no contest fee for posting or awarding. For services, the page says the full service price is funded at the time of ordering. This post is about project hiring, so neither is worked through below.
One more detail on the page matters for anyone reading it. It describes a promotion that reduces the freelancer project commission from 10% to 0% when a freelancer refers a new employer who creates a new account, and it states that other fees, including employer commissions, remain unaffected. Fee schedules carry promotions and conditions, so check the page on the day you hire instead of relying on this summary.
Worked arithmetic on three quote sizes
The $3.00 floor means a small job pays a higher percentage than a large one. The table applies only the fixed-price rules quoted above to three illustrative bid sizes. These are illustrations, not real quotes, and they ignore taxes, payment method charges and any promotion.
| Fixed-price bid | Employer fee (3% or $3.00, greater) | Total the brand pays | Freelancer-side fee (10% or $5.00, greater) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $50.00 | $3.00 (3% is $1.50, so the floor applies, which is 6% of the bid) | $53.00 | $5.00 (10% is $5.00, equal to the floor) |
| $100.00 | $3.00 (3% is $3.00) | $103.00 | $10.00 |
| $500.00 | $15.00 (3% of the bid) | $515.00 | $50.00 |
The takeaway the table proves: below $100, the floor and not the percentage sets the employer fee. At $100 the two coincide, and above it the percentage takes over. Each figure was recomputed against the page as fetched on 2026-10-04.
Fiverr and Upwork: what could and could not be checked
The check for these two platforms did not produce numbers, so this section gives none.
On 2026-10-04 the Fiverr terms of service URL and its pricing URL both returned HTTP 403 with a bot challenge page titled “It needs a human touch”, and the Fiverr help centre redirected without serving content. Fiverr’s own page could not be retrieved with readable content on the check date. Upwork’s legal and pricing URLs returned HTTP 403 with a page titled “Challenge”, and its support URL redirected without content. Upwork’s own page could not be retrieved either.
For that reason this post states no buyer fee percentage, small-order threshold or cap for either platform, and makes no comparison between them or against Freelancer.com. A figure remembered from elsewhere, or taken from a third-party article, would not be a figure from the vendor’s page. The practical step for a brand considering either platform is to read the checkout total before paying, and to compare it with the freelancer’s quoted price line by line.
What the fee does and does not buy versus a direct contract
The fee is not a pure surcharge. On Freelancer.com’s page it sits beside specific protections, and those are the only ones attributed here. The page describes a Milestone Payment System, under which the employer deposits funds into a milestone before work begins and the funds remain in the Freelancer account until they are released, refunded or dealt with under the User Agreement and applicable dispute-resolution process. For contests, it describes a Money Back Guarantee on prize money for up to 30 days from contest closing, with exclusions the page lists. These statements are about Freelancer.com and should not be assumed to hold at other marketplaces.
Going direct removes the client-side fee. It also removes categories of cover that a marketplace may provide. Weigh them as categories:
- Platform-held funds, so the money is not yet in the freelancer’s hands while work is under way.
- Platform-run dispute handling, where a third party applies a published process.
- A platform record of what was agreed, delivered and paid.
A direct contract makes the brand supply those things itself. The checklist of what to arrange:
- A written scope that says what is delivered, in what format and by which date, and what counts as done.
- A payment schedule, such as a deposit before work starts and a final instalment on delivery.
- A record of who was paid, when and how, kept by the brand.
- Its own handling of identity checks and the payment method used.
A decision rule follows from the arithmetic. On a $100 fixed-price job, the employer fee is $3.00 and the question is trivial. On a retainer-scale engagement, a 3% fee compounds into a few hundred dollars over its life, and the question of whether the protections are worth that is a different one. Neither answer is a recommendation. It is a way to size the fee against the exposure it sits next to.
Where the brand’s real exposure sits: paying, vetting, tax
The marketplace fee is one cost among several in hiring a freelancer. Payment processor charges are covered in what payment processors take from a payout. Vetting a hire is covered in what a background check costs. Tax paperwork for a direct hire is covered in 1099 filing tools for agencies with multiple freelancers. Those costs are not repeated here.
Prices verified, and what this page is not
Prices verified 2026-10-04 from https://www.freelancer.com/feesandcharges. The Fiverr and Upwork pages could not be retrieved with readable content on that date, so no figures are given for either.
This piece is not Watchdog data and is not on the re-verification schedule, so fees may have changed since the date shown. Check the vendor’s fee page on the day you hire.
followedapp is published by the team behind RecurPost, and RecurPost is covered vendor #34 under the same rules as every other vendor.
FAQ
Does the marketplace fee come out of the freelancer’s rate or get added on top for the brand?
Both kinds of fee can exist, as separate charges. Freelancer.com’s page shows an employer fee charged to the client and a commission taken from the freelancer. Whether a freelancer raises the quote to cover their own commission is not documented by the platform.
At what job size does the minimum fee matter?
On Freelancer.com’s fixed-price rule, the $3.00 floor outweighs 3% for any bid under $100. At $100 the two are equal, so on a $50 bid the $3.00 fee is 6% of the bid.
Sources
- Freelancer.com fees and charges, fetched 2026-10-04.