Most guides to hiring on OnlineJobs.ph start by telling you to subscribe. That is the wrong first step and it costs you money.
The sequence that works runs the other way. Post your job for nothing, see whether good people apply, and only then pay for the ability to talk to them. OnlineJobs.ph endorses this itself, and its own pricing FAQ says the free tier “gives you a good idea of if you’re going to find someone good.”
What follows is the whole process, and every step is anchored to something OnlineJobs.ph publishes rather than to a screenshot of a screen that may have changed. I run Ecommerce Paradise and a store of my own, and I have hired this way. Every figure came off the vendor’s pages on 16 September 2026.
Post Free First. Pay Second.
The free account posts jobs and shows you applications. It just will not let you talk to anyone. Use that.
Step 1: Register Free and Understand the One Thing It Blocks
Registration takes no credit card. The pricing page says so on the button itself.
A free account can post up to 3 jobs, view applications, bookmark workers, and use both TimeProof and EasyPay. There is exactly one thing it cannot do, and OnlineJobs.ph writes it in capitals: “You CAN NOT contact, interview, or hire people with a FREE account.”
That is the whole paywall. Not a feature ceiling, not a trial clock, one blocked action. Knowing that reframes the free tier from a demo into a genuinely useful research tool, and the rest of this guide is built on it.
The company is refreshingly blunt about why the wall sits there: “If we let employers contact workers without paying, they start to get scammy… Plus, it’s how we make money.” Both halves of that are true and most companies would print only the first.
Step 2: Post the Job Before You Pay, and Budget Two Days
Write your job post and publish it on the free account. Free job posts take 2 days to approve, against instant approval on paid plans, so start this on a Monday rather than the morning you want candidates.
The free tier shows you up to 15 applications per job. That is a small number and it is enough for what you are testing.
What you are testing is not the platform. It is your own advert at your own budget. If 15 applications arrive and none of them is credible, subscribing will not fix that, because the problem is the role you described or the salary you offered. If three genuinely strong people apply, you now know precisely what your $69 is going to buy.
Write the post as though the reader has options, because they do. Be specific about the work, the hours, the tools you use, and whether there is a path to more responsibility. Vague adverts attract vague applicants on every platform ever built.
Step 3: Buy One Month, Not One Year
When the applications justify it, upgrade. One caveat first, because this is the step the whole plan rests on: OnlineJobs.ph does not publish whether the applications you collected under the free 15-per-job cap all become contactable once you upgrade the same post. Ask support before you pay, or just repost the job after upgrading, which costs you nothing but the approval wait. Pro is $69 a month. Pro is also $299 a year, and the annual plan carries a “64% Savings!” badge that is arithmetically true and strategically misleading for most people.
| How you buy Pro | Cost | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|
| One month, then cancel | $69 | Filling one role, which is most people |
| Annual, paid upfront | $299 | Hiring repeatedly across the year |
| 12 monthly payments | $828 | Never |
The savings badge compares row two against row three. Row one is the option you probably want, and against it the annual plan costs 4.3 times more.
OnlineJobs.ph explicitly permits the hire-and-cancel play. Its FAQ: “Do I have to keep my subscription after I hire someone? No, you don’t have to keep it. There is no time requirement. No contracts.”
Two mechanics worth knowing if you do commit longer. Upgrading from Pro to Premium later charges only “the prorated difference”, and moving from monthly to annual credits your last monthly payment toward the annual cost. So starting small does not penalise you.
I went through every tier and both billing cycles in the OnlineJobs.ph pricing breakdown.
Step 4: Choose Pro or Premium on Three Numbers
Premium is $99 a month against Pro’s $69. Here is exactly what the extra $30 buys, and what it does not.
| Pro | Premium | |
|---|---|---|
| Job posts a month | 3 | 10 |
| Outbound contacts a month | 75 | 500 |
| Applications per job | 200 | 200 |
Read the third row. The application cap does not move. Upgrading buys reach, not depth, so if you are filling one role Premium is solving a problem you do not have.
Premium also adds unlimited background data checks, a worker mentoring service, and three features OnlineJobs.ph badges as new: AI Matching, One VA Away Access, and Contracts and Documents. The last two are not defined anywhere on the pricing page, which is worth knowing before you pay for them.
The honest rule: take Pro unless you specifically want background checks for a role touching money, or you genuinely need more than 3 job posts a month. Premium carries a “most popular!” badge, and that is a nudge rather than advice.
Building the Business, Not Just the Team?
A VA multiplies what already works. Suppliers, entity, store and launch come first. We build all of it with you.
Step 5: Know What the 75-Contact Limit Does Not Limit
People read “contact 75 workers per month” and assume they have 75 conversations available. That is not what it means, and the clarification sits in a tooltip most readers never open.
The tooltip, verbatim: “You may communicate with all job applicants. This limit only applies to using the ‘Contact’ button on worker profiles.”
So the cap applies only to cold outreach, where you go hunting through the database and message someone who never applied to you. Everyone who applies to your job post is unlimited.
The practical consequence is that if you write a good job post and let applicants come to you, the contact limit will never bind. It only matters if your strategy is proactive search, which is a different and slower way to hire.
Step 6: Set Up Payment Before You Hire, Not After
This is the step people leave until payday and then regret.
EasyPay is OnlineJobs.ph’s payment tool and it is free. The company is careful about what it actually is: “Its not a payment system itself though. You are always paying workers through an outside payment processor. Currently, we use Payoneer and Paypal to facilitate the transfer.”
On its own cut, it is unambiguous: “OnlineJobs.ph offers EasyPay for FREE. We take no overhead fees or any kind of cut of payments sent to workers.”
Which processor you use is worth a moment. Payoneer is the route OnlineJobs.ph says it has negotiated a fee waiver on, so that is the one with a published concession attached. OnlineJobs.ph does not publish a comparison between the two, so if you are considering PayPal instead, price it against its own fee schedule rather than assuming it matches.
Third parties do charge, and those numbers belong in your budget.
| Cost | Amount | Who bears it |
|---|---|---|
| Payoneer fee via EasyPay | 1 percent, waived by arrangement | Nobody |
| Funding by bank account | No fee | You |
| Funding by credit card | 3 to 4 percent | You |
| USD to peso conversion | 2 percent over market rate | Worker, unless you gross up |
Two things to do about that table. Fund by bank rather than card and you avoid 3 to 4 percent on every payment forever, which on a $600 salary is $18 to $24 a month.
And settle the forex question during the interview rather than after the first payday. OnlineJobs.ph says this itself: “It should be agreed upon during the interview/hiring process whether the monthly salary (lets say, $500 USD a month), excludes or includes the forex fees.” It is $12 a month on a $600 salary. Small money, and a genuinely bad first conversation to have in arrears.
Finally, timing. The first Payoneer payment takes 5 to 7 business days to land, and later ones 24 to 48 hours. Start the setup in week one, not on payday.
Step 7: Decide About Time Tracking Deliberately
TimeProof is OnlineJobs.ph’s time tracker. The company describes it as recording working time, taking automatic screenshots and reporting to you. The worker installs a client; you need nothing. It is “Always FREE to use” and it keeps working after you cancel your subscription.
Here is the part I did not expect. OnlineJobs.ph argues against its own feature on its own page:
“Now that we’ve given you the marketing pitch for Timeproof, let us offer you a different perspective. Time tracking is really invasive. Plus, it’s based on distrust. Is that really how you want to start your relationship with your new online Filipino specialist?”
I would take that seriously. Automatic screenshots are surveillance, and starting a working relationship with surveillance sets a tone you will not easily change later. My own position is that for a first hire on defined deliverables, judge the output rather than the hours. If you are paying hourly for open-ended work and you genuinely cannot assess output, tracking has a case. Decide which of those you are in before you install anything.
Step 8: Cancel, and Keep the Tools
Once you have hired, cancel. There is no contract and no minimum term.
The path is published: Account Dashboard, then the Account dropdown, then Billing, then Cancel Subscription.
What you keep afterwards is the useful part. OnlineJobs.ph: “Can I still use EasyPay and Timeproof after I cancel? Yes. Those are always available to use for free.”
So the end state is that you paid $69 once for access to people, and you keep the payment rail and the tracking tool indefinitely. That is an unusually clean exit for a subscription product, and it is the reason the one-month play works so well here.
Put a calendar reminder for the day before your renewal date. The most common way people overpay for this product is simply forgetting.
Step 9: Know Your Refund Window Before You Need It
There is a real 30-day money-back guarantee: “If you’re not happy for any reason within 30 days of upgrading, we’ll give your money back.”
And there is a limit that I have not seen quoted anywhere else, printed directly underneath it: “One refund per customer/company.”
You get one, ever. So do not spend it on a month you forgot to cancel, even though OnlineJobs.ph lists that as a refundable case. Save it for the outcome it exists for, which is paying to unlock contact and then finding nobody worth hiring.
One more thing to be clear about: this is not a free trial and the company is emphatic. Its pricing page carries a heading reading “Why No Free Trial?” and the line “It’s better than a ‘free trial.'” Any guide describing a free trial here has not read the page.
What to Pay, and Why I Will Not Give You a Number
The question everybody asks, and the honest answer is uncomfortable.
OnlineJobs.ph publishes no rate card, no salary ranges and no market averages anywhere on its site. Every “typical Filipino VA salary” table you will find online, including in things I have written before, is somebody’s personal experience presented as a benchmark.
What to do instead is straightforward. Post the role at a rate you can sustain, and let the applications tell you whether it is competitive. Too few credible applicants means the number is low. A flood of strong ones means you have room. That is real market data about your role, in your niche, this month, and it beats anybody’s table.
One thing that is not negotiable: whatever you agree, pay it on time, every time. In a market where you are hiring across a border and enforcement is impractical for both sides, reliability is the entire basis of the relationship.
Mistakes That Cost Real Money
Subscribing before posting. You can find out whether anyone good will apply for free. Paying first means paying to discover your advert does not work.
Buying annual for one hire. $299 instead of $69, for eleven months you will not use.
Funding payments by credit card. 3 to 4 percent on every payment, forever, entirely avoidable by using a bank account.
Leaving forex unagreed. Small money, and the fastest way to start a relationship with a disagreement about pay.
Reaching for Premium by default. The application cap is the same. Check you need the job posts before paying for them.
Forgetting to cancel. The single most common overpayment, and your one refund is better spent elsewhere.
Where Hiring Sits in the Build Order
Worth saying, because hiring is a popular early move and early is usually wrong.
A VA multiplies what is already working. They do not source your suppliers, choose your niche, or create demand for a store nobody visits. Before launch, a hiring 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 in this business and no assistant 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 an open question, read what high-ticket dropshipping actually is before hiring anyone to run part of it.
Every Tier, Every Limit, and the Refund Fine Print
What $69 buys against $99, why the annual badge misleads, and the line about one refund per company.
Common Questions
Can I hire on OnlineJobs.ph for free?
No. You can register, post up to 3 jobs and read up to 15 applications per job without paying, but the free account cannot contact, interview or hire anyone. That single blocked action is the entire paywall.
How long does a free job post take to go live?
Two days. Paid plans get instant approval, which is worth remembering if you are on a deadline.
Do I have to keep paying after I hire?
No. OnlineJobs.ph states there is no time requirement and no contract. Cancel from the Account Dashboard under Account, then Billing, and you keep EasyPay and TimeProof free.
Does the 75-contact limit mean 75 conversations?
No. It applies only to the Contact button on worker profiles, which is cold outreach. You can talk to every person who applies to your job post without limit.
Should I buy Premium?
Only for unlimited background data checks or if you need more than 3 job posts a month. The application cap is 200 on both Pro and Premium, so the extra $30 buys reach rather than more candidates.
Who pays the currency conversion fee?
By default your VA does, because the conversion happens when they withdraw pesos. What is negotiable is whether you raise the salary to cover it, and OnlineJobs.ph says that should be agreed during the interview. Conversion runs about 2 percent over the market rate, which is roughly $12 a month on a $600 salary.
How long until my VA gets paid?
The first Payoneer payment takes 5 to 7 business days, then 24 to 48 hours after that. Set the payment rail up in week one rather than on payday.
Should I use TimeProof?
It is free and it works after you cancel, but OnlineJobs.ph itself points out that time tracking is invasive and based on distrust. For a first hire on defined deliverables, judging output is usually the better choice.
Related Articles
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- 7 Best OnlineJobs.ph Alternatives in 2026
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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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