Freelancers’ profiles now have reviews. A client who has worked with someone can leave a rating from one to five stars and, if they want, a few sentences about how it went. The rating appears on the profile, above the list of reviews.
This is the piece the site has been missing. Everything else on a profile is written by the freelancer themselves: the headline, the description, the skills, the photographs. All of it is useful, and none of it is independent. A review is the first thing on a profile that comes from someone else.
Who can leave a review
Not everyone. This is the part worth reading carefully, because it is the difference between a rating that means something and a rating that does not.
You can review a freelancer only if you have sent them a message through the site. If you have never written to them, there is no review button on their profile, and the site explains why instead of showing one.
The rule sounds small, but it does the heavy lifting. Ratings are easy to fake when anyone can leave one: a competitor can walk in and leave one star, and a friend can leave five without ever having spoken to the person. Tying a review to a real conversation does not make that impossible, but it stops it being effortless.
Two more limits follow from the same idea:
- You cannot review yourself.
- You can leave one review per freelancer. It is not a running commentary, it is one considered opinion.
What this means in practice
If you are a client and you think you may want to leave a review later, send the message through the site rather than only calling.
The Contact button gives you the freelancer’s phone number, and for many jobs a phone call is genuinely the faster way to agree on things. That is fine. But a call leaves no trace on the platform, so if the whole conversation happened by phone, the review option will not appear afterwards. A short message through Write a message at any point is enough.
If you are a freelancer, the same rule works in your favour and slightly against you. It protects you from anonymous strangers rating you out of nowhere. It also means the client who was delighted with your work cannot leave a review if the two of you only ever spoke on the phone.
How it looks on the profile
The rating sits at the top of the reviews section: an average out of five, shown to one decimal place, and the number of ratings it is based on.
A freelancer with no reviews yet has no rating at all. Not five stars, not zero, nothing. This was a deliberate decision. Some sites show a perfect score to anyone who has not been rated, which looks generous but is misleading: it invents a reputation that nobody earned, and it quietly devalues the score of everyone who did earn one. An empty profile simply says that there are no reviews yet, which is true and is not something to be ashamed of.
Below the rating are the reviews themselves, newest first, ten at a time. Each shows who wrote it, their rating, the date and their comment.
What to write
A rating on its own is allowed, and it is better than nothing. A rating with two or three sentences is far more useful.
The useful sentences are the specific ones. What was the job. Whether the timing held. Whether the price at the end matched the price at the start. Whether communication was easy. What you would tell someone who is deciding.
The comment can be up to 2000 characters, which is more than most people need. Nobody reads a long review; they read the first two lines and the star rating.
A note on tone: write the review you would be willing to have the other person read, because they will read it. That does not mean only writing pleasant things. A calm, factual account of something that went wrong is far more credible, and far more useful to everyone, than either a furious one or a dishonest five stars.
If you want to change or remove your review
A review is not permanently locked to you. On the profile where you left it, your own review is marked as yours and has an option to remove it. If you remove it, you can leave a new one.
There is no editing in place. That is intentional: an editable review is a review that can quietly change meaning after someone has responded to it.
Reviews are published immediately
There is no approval queue. When you submit a review it appears immediately, without waiting for anyone to check it.
The alternative would be slower and, we think, worse. Reviews that appear days later are useless to the person deciding today, and a queue puts the platform in the position of deciding which opinions get published.
That does not mean anything goes. Reviews that are abusive, that contain personal data, or that are clearly not about a real interaction can be removed. If one appears about you and it should not be there, write to us through Contact and tell us which profile it is on and what the problem is. We will look at it.
Please do not use reviews for what they are not: a place to argue, to publish someone’s private details, or to complain about the platform. For the last one there is a contact form, and it reaches us faster.
What to do about a poor rating
Sooner or later, most people who work with clients get one.
The reasonable response is boring and effective. Look at whether the complaint has anything true in it. If it does, fix the thing it points at. If your next several jobs go well and get reviewed, one poor rating stops carrying much weight in an average, and a profile that shows one imperfect review among many good ones reads as more honest than a wall of five stars.
The unreasonable responses are the ones that cost you work: arguing in public, or asking friends to post ratings that balance it out. The second one is precisely what the messaging rule exists to make difficult, and it is obvious to anyone reading.
The short version
- Reviews are on freelancers’ profiles now: one to five stars, with an optional comment.
- Only someone who has messaged that freelancer through the site can leave one.
- One review per person, published immediately, removable by whoever wrote it.
- A freelancer with no reviews has no rating shown, rather than a flattering default.
- If a review should not be there, write to us through the contact page.
If you have worked with someone through Freelancinu and it went well, their profile is a good place to say so. It takes a minute, and it is worth more to them than anything they could write about themselves.