Speedlancer is the first freelancing platform to harness the power of the crowd for speed. The Melbourne, Australia based company opens its doors in 2014, but uses a unique crowdsourcing methodology to quickly deliver tasks for clients.
Speedlancer targets business owners who would like to take a load off and increase productivity. This is especially useful for business owners because multiple tasks can be done in parallel, so what would normally take days or weeks elsewhere can all be done in just 4 hours.
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Founder Adam Stone explains the service also works well for startups who need to launch their minimum viable product (MVP) immediately, to get up and running and test their concepts really quickly.
In a promised turnaround time of just 4 hours, you can have a design, writing, or data entry/research task done by their high-quality, curated ‘Speedlancers.’ This distributed team is located in different time zones around the world to provide ample coverage for requests that come in at all hours of the day and night.
All the writers are promised to be native English speakers.
How it Works
The first step is to describe the micro-job you need done, whether it’s a small design project, an article or other writing job, or some research-related task. Speedlancer plans to expand into other service areas soon as well.
You create a title, job description, and your desired budget. Then the task goes out into the queue of Speedlancer tasks a qualified worker jumps on it right away.
At the time of this writing, the average time to acceptance of a job is just 10 minutes.
Upon delivery, you are entitled to a round of free revisions, and if the work still is not done to your satisfaction, Speedlancer will re-enter it into the task-list to be re-done, or issue a refund. That way, the quality is guaranteed.
Plans and Pricing
On this platform, customers choose their prices using the sliding scale shown above, and then it is up to the Speedlancers to decide whether or not the task is a good exchange for their time and effort.
Adam recommended choosing a baseline price around the $29 mark, explaining that $29 will typically get you a 500 word blog post, a logo, banner design, poster, or business card design (just to name a few), and most smallish data-entry type work such as data mining.
If no one accepts your job within 8 hours, you’ll have an option to revise your description or increase your price. That way, the marketplace determines what a fair value for each job is.
The company takes a revenue share and passes the rest onto the individual worker who completed your job.
Speedlancer Alternatives
What sets Speedlancer apart is the turnaround time from start to finish. You don’t have to worry about submitting a job proposal to Elance or oDesk, then weeding through the dozens of applications.
For a small task, it’s more trouble than it’s worth!
The other primary alternative would be a specialist marketplace like Fiverr, but the challenge there is in sorting through all the noise to find the right seller for you. Even though I love Fiverr, I admit it can be time-consuming to find the perfect gig for what I need — and when I do, I’m frustrated because that seller is probably in high-demand and has 1-2 week lag in his promised delivery time.
Speedlancer aims to solve those pains by providing high quality service AND a fast turnaround time. Sure, you’ll pay more than $5, but it can be worth it if you’re in a hurry.
As soon as I have a chance to test out Speedlancer, I’ll report back and share my results here. Ahh, I should have had them write this article!
Your Turn
Have you worked with Speedlancer? If so, please share a quick review of your experience below to help others with their decision.
The Worst experience. The quality of work is poor and the Communication of their so called support team is even worse!! Waste of time! Upwork is the best, dont waste your time with this scam website!!
Speedlancer is THE best freelancing company to work for and i have tried many over the years but also stuck with Speedlancer. Great company you wont be dissapointed.
Stay Away!
Don’t even think of working with Speedlancer!
It has been a nightmare trying to work with them.
I paid $140 for a logo design and found out the hard way that there are no short cuts to quality design. They claim to give you back a full refund if they cannot get the job right “if the task doesn’t fulfill the description” but as I experienced, you could only “dream” of getting a refund when they totally fail on delivery.
Their work is of very poor and low quality (3 designer have to share your fee minus Speedlancer’s cut), and worse of all – their support is ridiculous.
I corresponded with Adam Stone who is their founder and was shocked to discover that this young kid has zero knowledge and no awareness to basic values of customer relationship, building credibility or any other values of excelling services.
I knew I had made a mistake immediately within 4 hours after I published my job when I got the first round of so called “designs” from three of their freelancers.
The quality of work was so much off, that I had immediately asked all designers to stop their work and I then contacted their support guy Sakib requesting their best designers to get on my task or if they are not capable – then I would like a refund.
“Sakib” wrote back to me (quote):
“please let them (designers) know what went wrong on the task page and they will work on it.
If they cannot get it right even with the round of revisions, I’ll be happy to refund and republish the tasks”.
I followed his advice, but when second round designs came in I was shocked again to find out another joke of low class deliveries.
Well, I asked for a refund as Sakib had promised, but guess what?
I was now refused with all kind of fairy tales that it was my fault…
Oh god, what a nightmare!
I will cut this story short and save you the details of this well-known path of back and forth countless frustrating emails where you can tell that the other side is deaf-dumb-blind to you.
If you do not have a budget for quality work, you could try Fiver – even their $5-$25 work has far much greater value.
Don’t trust Speedlancer or their founder Adam who makes promises in various publications, only to deny them later with ridiculous excuses putting you – his customer, at fault.
Stay away from trouble.
Disclosure:
I have no interest whatsoever to spend my energy and my time fighting Speedlancer, but the aggravation and the humiliation with this arrogant behavior of their founder has lead me take action, so nobody gets hurt again from this fraud.
Super fast super quality writing!
Ordered a bundle which I initially thought be a bit pricey but the output exceeded my expectation.
Very professional and promising. – Jonas
Hi guys,
I have a bad experience with speed lancer site.
Their experts dont know what they are asked initially.
My job was not done properly, i requested refund , no refund made. If i have to choose a freelancer , this site will never be in my list of recommended free lancers. They do only time work which can be any outcome, good or bad, they dont care.
There user interface and correspondence and user interface to interact with their experts is extremely unprofessional and their charges are sky high to what quality of service they offer. I highly recommend do not user speedlancer.com.au for your any work .
Hi Ameer,
Sorry to hear that you had trouble. Have you tried contacting our support team? We make ourselves available around the clock to facilitate these things!
We are relaunching our site this week and I think you’ll find the new user interface to be magical. We now offer live chat between customers and freelancers, which should make things much more efficient.
As for the work not being done properly, our guarantee is always: “if your task is not delivered according to your task description after the free round of revisions, you’re eligible for a full refund”. It’s important to be specific with your brief, and we’ve heard feedback across our more than 1000 customers that this is a fair and reasonable policy. We welcome any feedback!
Cheers,
Adam
Founder – Speedlancer.com
Service works fine… took me a couple of minutes to find out how the job posting works. Had my banner design done in 3 hours.
Their website is under maintenance I guess. They set up this Typeform survey that you fill up which asks for your info for the work you need done. I did all that and I received a fast response with my account info and all! I posted my task and got it done within a couple of hours I think. Good service.
I tried to get into their website to check it out. The form fields are invisible and it asks for your personal information and credit card right off the bat. Looks like the site got hacked or is a complete scam since it will not let you go to any other page, even when following Google’s links.
Are there any actual reviews of this service? Why give a 1 star rating on every value when you have not yet tried the product?
Ian is right. This is not a legitimate review of our service. That said, we are currently in the process of launching our brand new site (which will be a whole lot more awesome than it has ever been), and for the interim we have elected to put up a temporary survey landing page where we can use the information gathered to provide personal and high-touch service to each customer.
Thanks,
Adam
CEO – Speedlancer.com