In April 2009, Kate Hiscox founded Spudaroo. It helps businesses reach their full growth potential by connecting busy professionals with entrepreneurs who need quality business or career information. Reasonably-priced services for entrepreneurs include quality business plans, blog content, slide presentations, resumes, financial projections, web content, press releases, and sales content.
12designer's community of almost 12,000 creative freelancers -largely conceptual artists, project managers, and designers--use the marketplace to find jobs offered by designers and other clients. 12designer's design, text and concept, and multimedia jobs might include logo, website and banner design, naming and flyer design.
ScriptLance, founded in 2001 and based in Canada is one of the most popular and dynamic sites for technically savvy freelancers like programmers and web developers. This haven for potential freelancers doesn't charge any fees to register. Over 100 new projects arecirculated each day, most of them related to web development.
Freelancefree.com is a fee free freelancing marketplace which offers employers and freelancers the opportunity to post projects or bid on projects for free. At the time of review the site had over 100 active projects listed, 4500 employers and over 12,000 freelancers. The site shows potential and is certainly one to watch in the future, but its still a long way behind the leaders in the field, probably useful for freelancers to pick up some extra work - but unlikely to be enough to make a living.
At the end of June 2010, RentaCoder was rebranded vWorker. One of the top programming job markets on the web, it is expanding its focus to compete with other freelance marketplaces that have launched since the site was founded in 2001. vWorker currently connects over 300,000 freelance workers with over 150,000 buyers. There are currently over 2,700 open jobs on the site. This is one of the safest places to work, as the use of the escrow system is mandatory for every single project.
This site maintains a solid activity base, with 100 projects listed over the last month. Over 100 categories of freelance jobs are listed on project4hire.com, from writing to software development and much more. 17,000 plus daily page views make this Phoenixville, PA based website one of the more popular online job markets around.The site has over 36,000 freelance workers and 8,000 buyers. This puts it up there as a site worth using, particularly for those who want to avoid the big 4.
Contracted Work offers a platform for web designers, writers, software developers, and administrative freelancers, among other professionals, to find jobs and get paid via an escrow service. The site has thousands of listed providers,and it receives approximately 15,000 hits per month in the US. The webpage claims that 30% of their subscribers are international, and that they have plans to expand in that direction by featuring pages in different languages. The marketplace software is a bit basic and closed bids remain on display, helping attract search engine traffic - but making it hard to assess the usefulness and quality of the work available at any point in time.
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, which is a standard that defines the way webserver software can delegate webpage generation to a console application. As its name indicates, CGILance is exclusively dedicated to connecting Webmasters with Programmers. CGILance aims at being the perfect place to find top technicians capable of satisfying complex IT project requirements. The site is a relatively small operation; at the time of writing this review, there were only 4 open jobs.
Founded in 1997, Guru.com is an old hand as far as online freelancing websites are concerned. Guru lays claim to over 1 Million registered freelancers bidding on 8,000 jobs each month; making it one of the biggest fish in a growing pond. The sheer size of Guru's supplier base ensures buyers get keen prices for projects, but - quantity does not necessitate quality - so buyer beware certainly applies here.
