Every comparison of freelance platforms ranks them by fee percentage, and that ranking is close to meaningless, because half of them do not charge a percentage at all.
Contra charges a flat fee per contract. Upwork charges a share of everything you spend. Remote and Deel charge per contractor per month regardless of what you pay that contractor. OnlineJobs.ph charges a subscription and says it takes no cut of what you pay the worker. Those are four different meters, and which one is cheapest for you depends entirely on the shape of your hiring rather than on any number in a headline.
Here is the single clearest illustration. One contractor paid $5,000 a month costs $250 a month in Upwork fees and $29 a month on Remote. Same contractor, same work, same money changing hands, and one platform costs more than eight times the other. They are not identical products, and I will come back to that, because Upwork finds you the person and Remote does not. But no amount of sourcing value explains an eight-fold gap on the same payment.
I run Ecommerce Paradise and hire contractors for my own store, so this is a decision I have made with my own money. Every figure below came off each vendor’s own pages on 16 September 2026.
Four Meters, Not Four Prices
Percentage of spend, flat per contractor, subscription for access, or undisclosed. Work out which one suits you before comparing a single figure.
The Four Meters
Two caveats before any of the tables below, because they apply to every comparison in this article. These are not identical products: Upwork, Fiverr, Contra, Toptal and OnlineJobs.ph help you find someone, while Remote and Deel assume you already have. And Contra’s cheapest figures assume bank transfer, which Contra lists as request-access only and subject to eligibility review, so treat the card rate as your default until you are approved.
| Platform | What you are billed on | Client-side cost |
|---|---|---|
| Contra | Flat, per contract per contractor | $19 or $29 per contract, or per contractor per month if ongoing, plus card processing |
| Upwork | Percentage of spend | 5 percent, or 3 percent by US checking account |
| Fiverr | Percentage per order | 5.5 percent, plus $3.50 under $200 |
| Remote | Flat, per contractor per month | $29 a contractor |
| Deel | Flat, per contractor per month | $49 a contractor |
| OnlineJobs.ph | Subscription for database access | $69 a month or $299 a year, any number of hires |
| Toptal | Subscription plus an undisclosed rate | $79 a month, contractor rate not published |
Read down the third column and notice that only two of those numbers move when you pay someone more. That is the whole article.
The Comparison That Actually Decides It
Take one ongoing contractor and price the platform fee at three different rates.
| Platform | Contractor at $500/mo | At $2,000/mo | At $5,000/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upwork | $25 | $100 | $250 |
| Fiverr | $27.50 | $110 | $275 |
| Deel | $49 | $49 | $49 |
| Remote | $29 | $29 | $29 |
| Contra, bank transfer | $23 or $33 | $24 or $34 | $24 or $34 |
Over a year on that $5,000 contractor, Upwork costs $3,000 in fees and Remote costs $348. The gap is $2,652 a year on one person, and it is not a discount or a promotion, it is just two different ways of counting.
Now invert it. Three contractors at $500 each, which is a much more common shape for a store.
| Platform | Monthly fee | Annual fee |
|---|---|---|
| OnlineJobs.ph Pro | Flat subscription | $299 |
| Contra, bank transfer, at $19 | $69 | $828 |
| Upwork | $75 | $900 |
| Remote | $87 | $1,044 |
| Contra, bank transfer, at $29 | $99 | $1,188 |
| Deel | $147 | $1,764 |
The ordering rearranges completely. Deel goes from cheapest-but-one at $5,000 to most expensive here, and Remote drops behind Upwork, because per-head pricing multiplies by heads while percentage pricing does not care how many people there are. Upwork, which was the worst option on a single well-paid contractor, is now competitive.
So the rule is short. Few people paid well, use a flat per-contractor platform. Many people paid modestly, use a percentage platform or a flat subscription. Pick the meter that is not measuring the thing you have a lot of.
Upwork, and a Number Upwork Cannot Agree With Itself About
Upwork’s client pricing page says the Basic plan charges “a 5% Marketplace fee on all payments”, falling to 3 percent for eligible US clients paying by checking account. Business Plus charges 10 percent, or 8 percent by checking account. On top of either sits a one-time Contract Initiation Fee of $0.99 to $14.99 per contract.
Its own help centre says something different. The Client Marketplace Fee article states that you pay “up to 7.99% on all payments you make to freelancers”, with the same 3 percent reduction for bank account billing. Both pages are live today, neither carries a date, and the headline percentage does not match.
I am not going to tell you which is current because I do not know. What I will say is to check it in your own account before you model your costs, and treat any article confidently quoting one figure without mentioning the other as not having looked.
Take Upwork if you hire a lot of people for small, defined jobs, or you want the deepest talent pool and the most mature escrow and dispute system. At small amounts a percentage is genuinely cheap.
The honest caveat. Percentage pricing has no ceiling. A contractor you are happy with, working full time for two years, costs you a percentage of every dollar for the whole relationship. There is a point where you are paying thousands a year for an introduction that happened once.
Fiverr, and the Fee That Punishes Small Orders
Fiverr’s buyer fee is the clearest published number in this comparison. Its help centre states: “The standard service fee is 5.5% of your purchase amount, and we add a $3.50 fee to orders under $200.”
That $3.50 is the part worth thinking about. On a $50 logo tweak it is 7 percent on its own, taking the all-in cost to 12.5 percent. On a $180 order it is still nearly 2 percent. Fiverr is priced for buying finished things, not for buying lots of small things.
There is also a subscription layer. Fiverr Pro Essential is free with eligibility-based access, giving shortlisting and team management. Fiverr Pro Advanced is $129 a month plus tax, renewing monthly, and it cannot be paid for with Fiverr credits, coupons or an existing balance.
Take Fiverr if your work is packaged and one-off. A product photography set, a logo, a batch of listing descriptions. You are buying a deliverable at a known price.
The honest caveat. It is the wrong shape for an ongoing relationship. The fee recurs on every order forever, and the $3.50 floor means a habit of small orders is quietly expensive.
Building the Store, Not Just the Team?
Hiring is one piece. Suppliers, entity, store and launch are the rest. We build all of it with you.
Remote, the Cheapest Flat Fee in the Category
Remote charges $29 per contractor per month for Contractor Management, and says so in words that read like a direct attack on the percentage model. Its page says that instead of inflating baseline prices or applying percentage markups, it separates out specific services and support, so you only pay for what you actually use and nothing more.
That buys localized contract creation and signing, invoice approval with one-click or auto-pay, and its HR Core tooling. Contractor Management Plus at $99 a contractor adds indemnity covering up to $100,000 per contractor for penalties. Contractor of Record starts at $325 a contractor and shifts misclassification liability onto Remote.
Two structural facts matter. There is no minimum headcount, in Remote’s words “no minimum requirement”, and there are no platform, onboarding or setup fees on Contractor Management.
Take Remote if you have one to three contractors you pay well and you want proper contracts and compliance without a percentage. At $29 a head it is the cheapest flat option here by a clear margin.
The honest caveat. It is a compliance and payroll platform, not a marketplace. You have to find the person yourself. If your problem is sourcing rather than paying, this solves the wrong half.
Deel, the Same Model at a Higher Price
Deel charges $49 per contractor per month to hire and manage contractors, or $325 per contractor of record per month to shift classification liability. It also sells a $14 per worker per month talent-finding tier.
Included at $49: centralized contractor management, payments in over 120 currencies, automated invoicing, worker classification compliance, and what Deel calls “Tax form guidance & document collection”. Read that phrase carefully, because guidance and collection is not the same as filing, and no specific form is named anywhere on the page.
One thing to go in with your eyes open about. Deel’s FAQ says “Deel offers flexible month-to-month pricing with no long-term commitments required”. The promotional small print on the same page, for its PEO offer, requires “minimum two (2) year terms” with clawback of list-price fees on early termination. Both sentences are on the same page. The two-year term applies to that specific promotion rather than to contractor management, but it is worth knowing the phrase “no long-term commitments” has an exception living beside it.
Take Deel if you are paying contractors across many countries and want the broadest currency coverage, or you want contractor-of-record protection.
The honest caveat. At $49 against Remote’s $29 for a broadly comparable contractor product, you are paying a 69 percent premium per head. That is defensible for the breadth, and it is not defensible by accident.
OnlineJobs.ph, the Outlier That Wins on Volume
OnlineJobs.ph does something none of the others do. You pay for access to the database, then you pay the worker directly. Its own promise is “Hire direct. No salary markups or ongoing fees.”
The free account is deliberately limited and the site is blunt about it. You can browse resumes and view applications, but in its own capitals you “CAN NOT contact, interview, or hire people with a FREE account.” Pro is $69 a month or $299 a year, Premium is $99 a month or $349 a year.
The crucial detail is that the subscription is per account, not per hire. Three virtual assistants cost the same $299 a year as one. Ten cost the same as one. No other platform here behaves that way.
Take OnlineJobs.ph if you are building a team of Filipino virtual assistants, which describes a large share of ecommerce operations. On fees alone it is unbeatable above two hires.
The honest caveat. You get a database, not a service. Contracts, payment rails, currency conversion and any tax paperwork are yours to arrange. That is real work, and it is exactly the work Contra, Deel and Remote charge you to remove. Do not read the fee comparison as like for like.
Toptal, Where You Cannot Price the Engagement at All
Toptal’s pricing page publishes no numbers. No rates, no markup, no minimum. Its FAQ does publish one figure: “We have a flat monthly subscription fee of $79 that is charged if you decide to proceed with talent matching through Toptal.”
So $79 a month buys you matching. What the contractor actually costs is settled during that process and is not published anywhere.
The offsetting fact is a real one. Toptal says every engagement starts with “a trial period of up to two weeks”, and that if you are not completely satisfied, “you won’t be billed.”
Take Toptal if the vetting is the product. You need a senior specialist, you cannot afford a bad hire, and you would rather pay a premium than run a screening process yourself.
The honest caveat. You cannot budget from published material. For a store owner deciding between a $2,000 and a $5,000 commitment, that is a genuine problem, and it is the reason Toptal is at the bottom of this list rather than the middle.
Where Contra Actually Sits
Having priced the field, the case for Contra is narrower than its marketing but it is real.
Contra takes no commission on what a freelancer earns, which none of the marketplaces here can say. For the client, the cost is a flat per-contract fee that Contra’s own FAQ states as $19 in one answer and $29 in another, plus card processing at 2.9 percent and 30 cents, or the capped bank transfer rate if you are approved for it.
That puts Contra alongside Remote and Deel on the flat-fee side of the split, at a comparable or slightly lower price, with the difference that Contra is also a marketplace where you can find the person. Remote and Deel are not.
The catch is the card processing. On bank transfer Contra is genuinely flat at $24 or $34 a month. On a card it is 2.9 percent, which reintroduces exactly the percentage behaviour the flat fee was supposed to avoid. On a $5,000 contractor that is $145.30 a month of card fees sitting on top of a $19 fee, and Contra stops looking flat very quickly.
I went through every Contra fee, including the freelancer-side ones that shape what people will quote you, in the full Contra pricing breakdown.
How to Choose in Three Questions
How many contractors, and what do you pay each? Few and well paid points to Remote, Deel or Contra on bank transfer. Many and modestly paid points to Upwork or OnlineJobs.ph.
Do you need to find them, or just pay them? Remote and Deel do not source talent. If sourcing is your problem, Upwork, Fiverr, Contra, Toptal or OnlineJobs.ph are the shortlist and the compliance platforms are not.
How much paperwork do you want to own? OnlineJobs.ph is cheapest precisely because it hands you contracts, payments and tax handling. If you would rather not do that, you are buying a service and you should compare against Contra, Deel or Remote instead.
Answer those three honestly and usually only one or two options survive.
What I Would Actually Do
One well-paid specialist: Contra at $23 to $34 a month on bank transfer if you also need to find the person, or Remote at $29 if you already have them. The percentage platforms are indefensible at this shape once the rate is high.
A team of Filipino VAs: OnlineJobs.ph, and accept that you are running the payment and contract side yourself. At $299 a year for any number of hires nothing else is close.
One-off packaged deliverables: Fiverr, watching the $3.50 floor and batching small jobs into larger orders.
A mixed bench of ongoing small contracts: Upwork, because a percentage of a small number is a small number, and the escrow and dispute infrastructure is the most mature here.
A senior hire you cannot get wrong: Toptal, accepting that you are agreeing to the process before you know the price.
Whichever you pick, put a reminder in your calendar a month before renewal and count the contractors you are paying for against the ones actually working. Per-head platforms keep billing for people who finished months ago, in exactly the way per-seat software does.
Where Hiring Sits in the Build Order
Worth saying, because hiring help is a popular early move and early is usually wrong.
A contractor multiplies what is already working. They do not find you a supplier, they do not choose your niche, and they cannot create demand for a store nobody visits. Pre-launch, a hiring platform subscription is a cost with nothing to multiply.
What matters at that stage is what you sell, which the high-ticket niches list covers at no cost.
Supplier approval is the genuine bottleneck and no contractor unblocks it for you. The whole process is in the supplier sourcing guide.
Distributors want a registered entity before discussing terms, which the business formation guide walks through. If the model itself is still open, read what high-ticket dropshipping actually is before hiring anyone to run part of it.
Every Contra Fee, Including the Ones It Does Not Call Commission
The per-contract fee, the per-payment fee, card processing, and the payout costs by country.
Common Questions
What is the best Contra alternative in 2026?
Remote at $29 per contractor per month if you already know who you want to hire, because it is the cheapest flat fee that comes with contracts and compliance, and it has no minimum headcount. Contra lands slightly lower on bank transfer and also lets you find the person, so compare the two directly. OnlineJobs.ph at $299 a year if you are building a team of Filipino virtual assistants, because its subscription covers any number of hires.
Which platform is cheapest overall?
There is no single answer, and that is the point. One contractor at $5,000 a month costs $250 in Upwork fees and $29 on Remote. Three contractors at $500 each costs $299 a year on OnlineJobs.ph, $828 on Contra at the lower fee, $900 on Upwork and $1,044 on Remote. The ordering flips with the shape of your hiring.
Does any of them charge nothing?
No. OnlineJobs.ph comes closest for the transaction itself, taking no cut of what you pay the worker, but it charges $69 a month or $299 a year for the access that makes hiring possible at all. Its free account explicitly cannot contact, interview or hire.
Why do Upwork’s own pages give different fees?
I do not know. The client pricing page says 5 percent on the Basic plan while the Client Marketplace Fee help article says up to 7.99 percent. Both are live and neither is dated. Check your own account before budgeting.
Deel or Remote?
Same model, different price. Remote is $29 per contractor per month against Deel’s $49, so Remote wins on cost. Deel covers more than 120 currencies and sells contractor-of-record cover, so it wins on breadth if you are paying people in many countries.
Is Toptal worth it if the price is not published?
Only if vetting is what you are buying. The $79 monthly subscription is published, the contractor rate is not, and Toptal says every engagement starts with a trial of up to two weeks and that you are not billed if you are not completely satisfied. If that promise holds, it is what makes the opacity survivable.
Can I use more than one?
Yes, and most established stores do. A common split is OnlineJobs.ph for ongoing virtual assistants, Fiverr for packaged one-off creative work, and a flat-fee platform for the one or two specialists you pay properly.
Related Articles
- Contra Pricing 2026: Commission-Free Is Not the Same as Free
- Best VA Platforms for Small Business in 2026
- 7 Best OnlineJobs.ph Alternatives in 2026
- Fiverr vs Upwork: Which Freelance Platform Is Better for Ecommerce Hiring?
- OnlineJobs.ph vs Upwork in 2026
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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