UPDATE: It appears Rev is out of business. Please consider one of these alternatives or see below. If this information is incorrect, please email me.
Rev is a professional transcription, caption, subtitle, and translation service. The company is a venture-backed internet startup and was founded in 2010.
One of the missions behind starting Rev was to give more people the freedom to work from home.
Rev has given thousands of remote workers the opportunity and freedom to work from home, while providing professional transcribing and translation services to entrepreneurs and businesses worldwide.
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About Rev
The company is funded by Globespan Capital. Their headquarters is located in San Francisco, and their workers work remotely from home all over the globe.
Rev’s founder and CEO is Jason Chicola, a former Director of Marketing and Sales at oDesk. Jason started Rev with co-founder Josh Breinlinger, also a former oDesk employee.
The purpose of the platform is to remove the hassle of finding a freelancer through a marketplace to do your work. Just submit your job online via a form adding your document and any details that’ll help the freelancer and you’ll receive a file back within the specified time.
Rev boast a 99% accuracy rate, more than 50k+ happy customers, 30+ languages, and live telephone support should you have any questions.
How Rev.com Works
Services
Rev offer the following services:
- Transcription – Typing up spoken audio, like minutes from meetings, interviews, market research and similar. There is a 12 hour turnaround time for transcription jobs.
- Captions and Subtitles – You may want captions or subtitles added to your videos to help the hearing impaired or add an interactive element. There is a 24-48 hour turnaround time for captions and subtitles.
- Translation – Translate any documents to or from English to another language. Turnaround starts at 24 hours but may be longer depending on the size of the job.
Plans and Pricing
Rev have flat rates across all of their services making it easy to price up a job, their rates for each of their services are as follows:
- Audio Transcriptions – $1 per minute. Timestamps and verbatim cost an extra $0.25 per minute each.
- Captions and Subtitles – $1 per minute.
- Business Translations – $0.10 per word, with a minimum charge of $20 per order.
- Certified Translations – $33 per page. A page is defined as 250 words or less on one side of A4 paper.
Rev Alternatives
Rev is the leader in transcription services, though you may be able to find lower cost options on Fiverr or via an AI tool like Trint.
For translations, you might consider TextMaster, which offers a similar range of services. They are a little more flexible with their pricing as you have the option of choosing price plans based on the experience of the freelancer.
You can also find freelancers on open marketplaces like Upwork if you feel comfortable looking through profiles and applications to find someone you want to work with.
Your Turn
Have you worked with Rev? If so, please leave a review of your experience below to help others with their decision, thanks.
It was good when I started, but they cut our rates 70%. Since then, it is not worth working with them.
Before they cut their rates down, I would make about 160 dollars per week, now it would be 45 dollars per week for the same amount of work.
What a pity.
I work for Rev since 2016 as a translator, and the rate is 5.6/m. However, I have received an email around September 2018 from Rev saying that, the rate will be lowered to 1.5/m effective from 7th Sept, and the rate may be increased over time. I am truly shock, and I won’t work for them unless the rate is adjusted back to reasonable range.
Rev.com is an AWESOME company! They have outstanding customer service, fair pricing, and a great program to easily put video closed caption on your videos as well as much more! I would highly recommend them to anyone!!! Anyone complaining about them is most likely unreasonable or unfair! Keep up the great work Rev.com!
I have done work for Rev and still have an active account. Something customers should know is that this is a company that does not pay its contract workers even minimum wage. There are people there working for $4 an hour or less who are not living in a third world country (given that this is a job for native English speakers).
So, why are they working for so little? Because they are either naive newbies who don’t realize they are being systematically underpaid and blame themselves for being ‘too slow’ etc. and think they’ll eventually make decent money OR they are desperate because they have few choices: people like stay-at-home moms with young kids or the elderly or disabled who find it hard to work a regular 9 to 5 job.
The truly sick part is Rev know this and they exploit the most vulnerable anyway with unethically low wages and unethical treatment. For example, if you are one hour past your deadline even if you’re almost done, all the work you’ve completed up to that point will be taken from you and you will be paid NOTHING for it.
Your account can be terminated without warning even though all your performance metrics had been up to what is required.
Workers who value themselves should not be working for Rev and customers who have an ounce of social responsibility should realize that cheap price they pay comes at a cost.
For customers who have a conscience and are socially responsible either take your business to a place that fairly pays their workers or directly contract with a transcriptionist and pay them the $1/minute or so you’d be paying Rev. I am sure they’d be willing to tailor your transcript to suit your needs and work with you instead of having Rev’s inflexible rules.