Our fee

We have a simple, if unusual, fee model: we don't charge our clients - i.e. the companies looking for a freelancer through Uplink - but we charge our members a fee when they acquire a new client through us. This fee is 10% of the rate that the freelancer charges the client in the first 12 months of working with them.

This fee only applies for direct jobs, not for recruiter jobs.

Why charge the freelancer instead of the client?

The primary reason is that this model ensures that our interests are aligned with those of our members.

For most companies in the recruiting space, their fee is the difference between what they charge the client and what they pay the freelancer. This approach always has the effect that recruiters benefit from paying the freelancer as little as possible.

In contrast, since our fee is based of the freelancer's rate, it is in both ours and the freelancer's interest to set as high an hourly rate as possible. So when we negotiate with clients, or advise them on what is an appropriate hourly rate for a particular job posting, we always negotiate in the interests of our members.

In reality, what happens most of the time is that our members add our fee to the hourly rate they effectively want to get. This means that clients end up paying the fee indirectly, which is not a problem for most as long as the overall price and our service is worth it to them.

In addition, our model has other advantages. Because our clients don't receive any invoices from us, we don't have to sign a contract with them, which speeds up the job posting process enormously. Moreover, because our service is free to clients, we can be stricter in our selection of projects, e.g. not posting any projects with an unrealistically low hourly rate.

Tax booking of our fee

Many times the question has come up how to properly book the invoices with our fee. According to our tax advisor, Buchhaltungskonto 4760 “Verkaufsprovisionen” is correct.