Okay, ready for a rant? First off, I have no affiliation with Guru (they don’t even have an affiliate plan).

I’m sure neither of us has time to go over all the annoying little details. The gist of the situation is that Elance is too complicated in pricing structure, too expensive, and just comes across as plain greedy. Recently Elance sent out a notification of enhancements that were really the last straw for me.

At first it looked good with the headline, “Rollover Connects And More Now On Elance.” Connects (number of or bids allowed) not rolling over was one of  my biggest peeves on Elance. Once they had your money, they ran with it. Already being more expensive than other boards and having listings no better than anyone else, I saw little advantage to Elance; except one: KillFive readers did not need to be members to view job listings, meaning one-click and you are there.

Well, when they showed how “generous” they were by giving the rollover for connects. They also added a few extra connects to the account plans. Looking at the numbers, I was astounded at how incredibly expensive this site is for finding work! I just snapped. $10 a month to bid on up to 25 jobs? At the best price, you can buy as many as 60 extra connects for $40? And jobs over $1,000 will cost between 3 and 5 connects? At this point, there was steam escaping from my ears.

So, with what could I be comparing Elance that made me so fired up? Guru, Guru, Guru! Guru gives you 100 bids per month for a single profile (perfect for individual writers). That’s more bids than any single Elance plan. On Elance you would pay $40/ month for 60 connects, then you’d have to pay another $20 for the remaining 40 connects to get the same 100 Guru connects! It would be awfully hard to make that money back, assuming you get maybe 1 or 2 out of every 10 jobs you bid, which is common.

Now contrast that with Guru. The site gives you 100 connects, period. They only have three plans instead of four. One is for free, one for individual writers and one for writing groups (vendor). Easy. Add to that the less expensive structure. 100 connects will cost an individual writer about $25 per month. You can get it as low as $12.50 per month if you sign up for a year in advance. So you choose: $12.50 a month or $60? Dang!

The only time you will use more than one bid on Guru is if you want a premium proposal. Here the cost is 8 bids (much higher than Elance’s 2 or 3) but there is no necessity for creating premium proposals. You still find work easily without them. And with 100 bids, you could put in premium proposals often without running out of bids.

So why didn’t KillFive post Guru jobs before? Because on Guru, you must join under at least a free membership before you can view the job listings that KillFive links to. I just didn’t want to put you folks through the hassle. But guess what? The quality and pay for jobs is better on Guru. The membership cost is less. Even the job fees are 1% lower than Elance (5% vs 6%).

Phew! I feel better. Thanks for reading my rant. Get yourself a free membership at Guru and see if it works as well for you as it does for me. Every major client I have, bar one, was found on Guru. The site has paid for itself three or four times over just in Guru jobs alone. The repeat business dollars outside of Guru has been in the tens of thousands. Give it a try and let me know if you are as successful on Guru as I have been!

Regards,
Killer