Did the big freelance marketplaces ever work out for you or is it all twelve dollar bids now

Model it before you commit, and get the current numbers yourself rather than from a thread, because the fee structures and the cost of bidding have both changed more than once since I started and anything I quote you will be out of date. What matters is the arithmetic: cost per proposal, proposals per win, platform cut of the win. Mine worked out to a meaningful percentage of gross once bidding costs were in, which was fine at the rates I ended up at and would have been ruinous at the rates I started at.

I started at low rates deliberately to get going and it took a year to climb out, because my profile history was visible and clients anchored on it. If you do use a platform, start at the rate you actually want even if you sit idle for a month. The cheap first jobs are not an investment, they are a public price list.

The platforms paid my rent for about eight months and I would do it again with one change in mindset: it is a lead source, not a business. The rates are genuinely low at the bottom and genuinely fine in the middle if you niche hard enough that only twenty people can do what the posting describes. What killed it for me was not fees, it was that the good clients wanted an ongoing relationship and the platform is designed around discrete jobs, so eventually you both drift off it as contracts end.

Use it for a quarter, treat it as paid advertising with a measurable cost per client, and drop it the moment referrals cover your capacity.

With two warm clients already, I would skip it. Every hour on a marketplace is an hour not spent telling the twenty people who already know your work that you are available, and referral work starts at a higher rate and a shorter sales cycle. The platform teaches you to compete on price against people whose cost of living is not yours, and unlearning that took me longer than learning it.

Mixed experience worth adding. Two of my longest running clients came from a marketplace and both moved to direct contracts once the platform terms allowed it, so it was not wasted. But my inbound from a specific portfolio site and a mailing list has out earned it every year since year two.