I am currently comparing the leading online talent markets. How useful are they for outsourcing computer vision and OpenCV projects? ODesk, Elance and Freelancer.com provide on-demand access to more to more than 1 million technical workers.  But while working on this outsourcing portal review, Freelancer.com’s nickel-and-diming approach annoys me to no end.

I posted a project, and after it is was live I noticed a few typos. No big deal, just click “edit” and fix it. Right? Nooo! First, you can no longer edit your project description even if no bids have been placed yet. You can only amend it. While this makes very good sense after bids have been posted, there is no reason to restrict editing before that. Not good, but oh well. But the next step really annoyed me:

So no editing, ok. Then just delete the project and post a new one? No way, Freelancer.com charges you $5 to simply delete a project:

Even worse is that privacy is not on by default. Your project description is - by default - open for the whole world see and for Google to index. That is really not good.

It is ok to pay to be a featured project, and maybe even to extend the bidding period. But paying $19.00 to hide my project from the search engines? What is next? Google asking me to pay to prevent my Gmail emails from being indexed? I understand I only have the basic account, but please don’t make my pay with my privacy. And once we are at it, the sealed project should also be a default setting, not an upgrade.

Again, I don’t mind paying for quality services, but I dislike being nickled and dimed at each step.