What each freelance platform actually takes from you

Almost every platform comparison you can find lists a headline commission and stops there. The headline commission is rarely the largest number, and on two of these platforms it isn't even the number that decides whether the project was worth taking.

So this runs one project through all of them. Take a $1,000 fixed-price project — an illustration, not observed data — and follow it to the point where the money is in your bank account, not your platform balance. Every figure below comes from the platform's own fee page, linked inline. If a platform doesn't publish something, I say so instead of estimating.

Upwork: variable, per contract, and there are three other fees

The old flat 10% is gone. Upwork's freelancer service fee is now variable between 0% and 15%, set per contract, shown to you before you accept, and locked for the life of that contract. Upwork Payroll and Any Hire contracts are 0%; Enterprise clients are typically 10%.

The practical consequence is that you cannot know what you keep until you look at the specific contract. On our $1,000 project at 10% you keep $900. At 15% you keep $850. That range is $50 of margin on a $1,000 job, decided by a number on the offer screen that most people scroll past.

Direct Contracts, where you bring your own client onto Upwork for the payment protection only, cost 5% on the Basic plan and 0% on Freelancer Plus. Freelancer Plus is $19.99 a month, so it pays for itself at $19.99 ÷ 0.05 = $399.80 of direct-contract billing per month, before you count anything else it includes.

Then the two fees people forget.

Connects. Proposals are a purchased input. Connects cost $0.15 each, minimum purchase of 10, with 10 free per month on Basic and 100 on Freelancer Plus, and 30 more for earning a badge. Individually trivial, but Connects spent divided by contracts won is your real cost per acquisition here, and most people have never calculated it.

The Contract Initiation Fee. This one is $0.99 to $14.99, one time per new contract, charged to the client rather than to you. It is non-refundable after payment has been made to a freelancer, even if the client later wins a dispute. You never see it on your side, but it sits on top of what your client pays, which means it competes with your rate in exactly the same way the client-side commission does.

That client-side commission is where Upwork's own pages disagree with each other. The help centre states "up to 7.99%" for clients on the free Basic plan, dropping to 3% for qualifying US clients paying by bank account, and 10% on Business Plus, 8% for eligible US checking-account payers. Upwork's own marketing page describes the same fees as "3%-5%" and "8%-10%". Cite the help centre. When a company's marketing page and its support documentation give different numbers, the support documentation is the one its billing system follows.

Why should you care what the client pays? Because on a $1,000 contract the client may be spending $1,080 or more, and their budget was $1,000. That gap comes out of your rate in the negotiation, not out of Upwork's revenue.

Fiverr: 20% is your number, 28% is the market's

Fiverr is the simplest one to state. You earn 80% of the purchase amount, including Gig Extras and tips. On the $1,000 project you keep $800.

Buyers pay 5.5% plus a flat $3.50 on orders under $200. That flat fee is the one to notice, because it is regressive: on a $50 order the buyer pays $2.75 plus $3.50, which is 12.5% on top. Combined with your 20%, a $50 gig means the buyer spends $56.25 and you receive $40, so roughly 29% of the buyer's spend stays with the platform. On a $1,000 order the buyer pays $1,055, you receive $800, and the platform's share falls to about 24%.

Fiverr's own reported blended take rate was 28.0% in the second quarter of 2026. That figure includes seller fees, buyer fees and advertising revenue, so don't quote it as your commission — but it is a fair estimate of what the marketplace extracts from a transaction overall.

Seller Plus costs $25 a month for Standard and $49 for Premium and reduces your fee by nothing. It buys visibility and tooling. There is no break-even to calculate, only a judgement about whether the promotion works, which is a different kind of decision from the Guru one below.

Freelancer.com: the withdrawal rules matter more than the commission

Commission is straightforward: 10% or $5, whichever is greater, on fixed-price projects, 10% on hourly, and 15% on Preferred Freelancer or Recruiter projects. On the $1,000 project you keep $900, or $850 as a Preferred Freelancer.

The costs that catch people are on the way out. Withdrawals require a $50 minimum balance. PayPal, Skrill and Payoneer withdrawals cost $1, local bank transfer is free, and an international wire costs $25. If you are outside the local-transfer network and you wire out a $900 balance, that $25 is another 2.8 percentage points, taking your effective total to nearly 13%. Bidding also requires a $20 minimum balance.

The rule that follows: never assess a platform on commission alone if it holds your money. Commission is charged once; the payout cost is charged every time you withdraw.

PeoplePerHour: the fee falls as the relationship ages

PeoplePerHour tiers commission by lifetime billing per buyer, which is unusual and worth understanding before you quote. It is 20% below £250, 7.5% between £250 and £5,000, and 3.5% above £5,000, all excluding VAT, with a £1 minimum per invoice.

Note the currency — those thresholds are in pounds and I am not converting them.

The behaviour this rewards is obvious once you see it: the first £250 you bill a client is expensive and everything after is cheap. A one-off £200 job costs you £40 in commission. The same £200 as the fifth invoice to a client you have already billed £5,000 costs £7. If you work PeoplePerHour, the strategy is depth per client, not breadth.

Guru: you are buying a lower rate with a membership

Guru is the clearest fee-versus-subscription trade on this list. The membership tiers run Basic (free, 9% job fee), Basic+ at $11.95 for the same 9%, Professional at $21.95 for 7%, Business at $33.95 for 6%, and Executive at $49.95 for 5%. Basic gets 10 bids a month; paid tiers get 50.

The arithmetic is one division. Professional saves two percentage points for $21.95, so it breaks even at $21.95 ÷ 0.02 = $1,097.50 billed through Guru per month. Business saves three points for $33.95: $1,131.67. Executive saves four points for $49.95: $1,248.75.

Below roughly $1,100 a month on the platform, the free tier wins on fees, and you are paying only for bid volume. Above it, upgrading is arithmetic rather than optimism.

Malt: a discount for staying on the same project

Malt charges freelancers 5% to 10% excluding tax, and the rate drops to 5% after six months on the same project. On a €1,000 project you keep €900 to €950.

That structure is built around long European contracting engagements rather than one-off gigs. The fee schedule tells you what work the platform expects.

Contra: zero to you, which means the client pays

Contra takes no commission from freelancers on project earnings. It monetises the client side instead, with per-payment fees of $2 on payments of $1 to $199, $5 on $200 to $499, $10 on $500 to $999, and $29 on $1,000 and above, halved for clients on Contra Pro, which is $29 a month or $199 a year.

On the $1,000 project you keep $1,000 of the project fee. You do still pay to get the money out: currency conversion at 0.40% or 1.00%, PayPal at 2%, Payoneer at $3 plus 1–2%, crypto at 2%.

The honest framing is that the money still comes from the same transaction. A client comparing you against an Upwork freelancer is comparing a $1,029 total against a $1,080 total, and how that difference lands in your rate depends entirely on who is negotiating.

Toptal: the talent-side number is not published

Toptal's client pricing is public: a flat $79 per month platform subscription on top of the talent's rate, an initial trial period of up to two weeks, and invoicing twice monthly on Net 10 terms.

What Toptal charges on the talent side, or what markup sits between what the client pays hourly and what the freelancer receives, is not published anywhere. I am not going to guess at it, and you should treat any article that states a specific Toptal markup percentage as unsourced. If you are considering Toptal, the number you need comes from your own offer, and it is the only one that matters.

Compute what you keep, not what they charge

Three things this table can't show you, which you should add yourself.

Time to cash. A 10% fee that pays out in two days is often better than a 5% fee that pays out in three weeks, and no fee page mentions that.

Acquisition cost. Connects, bid allowances, membership fees and the hours spent writing proposals all belong in the numerator. Divide by contracts won.

What the hour actually earned. Run one finished platform project through the effective hourly rate calculator, with the commission deducted and the proposal-writing hours counted, and compare it against a direct client. That comparison is the entire argument, and it is more useful than any of the percentages above. The measurement method is set out in freelance rates: the number that matters isn't the one you quote.

Percentages compound, subscriptions don't

Here is the structural point behind the table. A commission scales with your success; a flat tool cost doesn't. Bill $60,000 in a year on Fiverr and the 20% is $12,000. The freelancer-operations software category, by contrast, clusters around $12 to $29 a month for a solo tier — Bonsai's entry plan is $15 per user per month, $9 on annual billing, which is under $200 a year at list, whatever you bill. That is why the comparison between paying a platform and running your own stack gets more one-sided the more you earn.

None of which means quit the platforms. It means know which clients justify the take rate. A platform earns its 20% when it introduces you to a buyer you could not have reached, protects a payment you could not have chased, and does it repeatedly. It has not earned 20% on the second, third and fourth project with a client you already know — and the point at which you move that relationship off-platform, where you invoice them directly on your own terms, is a commercial decision with a number attached, not a loyalty question. Check the platform's terms on off-platform contact before you do it.

Where the platforms sit against every other way of finding work is in where freelance work actually comes from in 2026, and the case for boards, which take nothing at all, is in job boards versus marketplaces.

What to check before your next proposal

In the next 30 minutes: open the last three contracts you accepted on any platform and write down the actual fee percentage on each, the amount you withdrew, and the withdrawal cost. Add them up. That single number is your real take rate, and it is usually a few points higher than the headline you had in your head.

This month: pick your two biggest platform clients and calculate what each project would have paid you as a direct engagement — commission back, payout fee back, your own payment terms, your own invoice. If the difference is more than a month of any tool you would need to run it yourself, you have your answer for the next renewal of that relationship.

Worklyn's pricing charges a payment collection fee of 1% on the free plan and 0.5% on Pro, which is a number you can put in the same table as everything above and compare directly.