Fiverr is a website that connects businesses with freelancers around the world. They offer digital services in 300+ categories.

I've used Fiverr for so many business tasks for years now, so I wanted to update my Fiverr review. Since then, I've become a VID (Very Important Doer). That's basically a program to reward their most active buyers with special promotions, discounts, and support.

Fiverr gets valuable feedback to improve the product, and VIDs usually spend more and are more loyal). In this review, you'll learn what I love and don't love about Fiverr.

What I use Fiverr For

Here are some of the ways I've used Fiverr to find freelancers to do work for my business:

• Jingles for a YouTube channel
• Write a song/produce music for a parody
• Graphic design, including logos and social media graphics
• Facebook ad campaigns
• SEO reports and fixes for my website
• Blog posts and articles
• Edit videos
• Run YouTube and Twitter ads
• Set up a Shopify store

One task I haven't used but think that I should is anything to do with LinkedIn marketing. Generally, I'm wary of using Fiverr to send tweets or get followers or anything that could be spammy. 

I started using Fiverr in 2014, and have hired people to do a variety of jobs. I hope this Fiverr review is helpful to you. If you want to check out Fiverr, please use my link here.

Fiverr makes it simple to try out several people until I find someone who's work I really like. However, it's a lot of trying. Most results are good enough. I still have to put the time in to fix and improve what I got.

For the most part, I'm happy with Fiverr; I keep coming back. It really fits my personality. The way it works is I get an idea for something, and I want it done right away. I want to execute on the smaller things and get the payoff. 

Next I want to hire someone to optimize my WordPress speed and get rid of redundant or unneeded plugins.

Fiverr Review

Here are the best and worse things about Fiverr from my experiences over many years. I admit I struggle to manage people well, and with some cultural barriers on top of that, it can be a challenge. However, I've found the same issues hiring agencies to do the work, and they typically cost a lot more.

For example, I hired an agency to write SEO optimized articles. I still had to rewrite them. $70-140 for a 1,000-word article with a subscription plan. On Fiverr, I paid $90 for a 1-time article that came with a table of information and a sample social media post.

I did find someone who did just as good of a job for $10, but he's so backed up, and it's on a platform that's not nearly as good at setting deadlines as Fiverr is.

POWER TIP for hiring someone to write an article. Look for a specialist. If you're writing about digital advertising, try to find someone with that expertise. There are a lot of generalists who will research topics but you'll get better quality generally speaking, if you hire someone with a background or experience on the topic.

What I LOVE about Fiverr

There are hard deadlines, and it's essential to meet them, or the system hurries the project along. After you order a gig and pay for it, you submit your requirements. Then a due date is set. Once you get your order, if you don't approve an order within 3 days, it closes the order and pays the provider. Your seller is graded on delivering the product on time.

So things don't drag on. They give exact dates, and you can even put them on a calendar, so you know when the project is due and follow up.

Today I submitted an order. I get a text message reminding me to submit the requirements and after I do, I get a due date, 3 days from now. Fiverr is acting as a project manager, keeping things moving along.

Look how fast the order was created and is in process:

Defined work and tasks make it easier to work with people. Competition gives an incentive for people to perform. And it's easier to compare different people's work. This is great because I want an article by tomorrow and I have no idea who to hire. Well, on Fiverr I have control a lot of the variables and can choose someone to fit. Work gets done because it's so specific. This is only a problem if you don't know what you want.

Reasonable price. Over time there are many more add-on tasks, and it's rarer to find work for less unless you want to take a chance on someone who's new or doesn't have ratings.

Some people criticize and would never use Fiverr because they think it's exploiting workers for low pay. I disagree. As a business owner, I set my budget. I may not know who to hire to help me write a song.

It may not need to be radio station quality. I can go to Fiverr and see a lot of options and choose someone. I don't waste time trying to educate myself on the market and people who are far above my budget (who I may insult).

Also, a fair wage in the US can be totally different from the wages in another country. At $5 an hour USD, a worker in the Philippines can live a good life. A professional makes about $900 a month. Money goes further. It's like the difference between getting paid $80k in Utah and making that in Silicon Valley.

Also, I've paid just as much or more on Fiverr as for similar US-based services. There's a huge diversity of prices and freelancers so to accuse people of paying too low can't be accurate since all jobs are different (and they don't know what you paid).

It's ridiculous to business shame people over paying for work they get done on Fiverr. We're all in different stages of our business with different budgets and expectations.

Be specific and know what you want. The more exact and specific you are about what you want done, the better. You can get your entire website created for a reasonable cost on Fiverr, for example. But if you're not sure what you want you'll get lower quality work. Generally speaking I've not found Fiverr freelancers to be great at giving input and expanding on a concept. They're best at doing something specific.

Frustrations about Fiverr

Steal ideas; this isn't my frustration. I don't hire people on Fiverr for super confidential things. It hasn't happened to me that I know of but for something like t-shirt designs, but it happens with ideas. The same thing exists elsewhere. However, Fiverr has freelancers from many countries, some with less culture and laws prohibiting this. 

From Reddit: “Most people say “ideas can't be stolen, only execution matters.” I get that, but I've heard of outsourcing firms working on a product for months, then duplicating the codebase, and opening their own version of the app.”

Communication can be more challenging when the person isn't a native speaker.

Had some very unprofessional interactions with sellers. But I start out small to test the waters first before I hire for larger projects.

Feedback is a nightmare. Anything less than 5 stars hurts a provider. Some are aggressive and will even contact customer service and get feedback removed if you don't give them 5 stars, even if your complaints are legit.

For example, I hired someone to write an article for my blog. I included specific topics and subtopics to include and links. I talked about tone and gave context. The freelancer did what he promised, and he was fast. The article was longer than promised (over 1,000 words). 

However, it was full of cliques and poorly worded sentences. I ran the article through Grammarly and fixed a lot of grammatical errors. In addition, I checked for plagiarism to make sure the article wasn't just a rewrite of someone else's article (it wasn't).

BTW, I used Grammarly to proofread this article and it caught a lot of grammatical errors and improved my writing. I'm going to use it more in my business.

Not being a native English speaker, I had to fix his wording on certain items and on phrases that were awkward. Sometimes he used metric and other times standard measurements. 

So overall, I wouldn't give 5 stars. I had to rewrite and fix too much. He really should get a Grammarly subscription! I want to warn others what to expect (they might be okay with it), but I wouldn't hire him again. It's just too much work to fix.

Another provider was very offended when I didn't give her a perfect score. She was very upset and unproductive about it. She'd just write things like and something like, WOW! I finally blocked her. That's probably the worst experience I've had because I gave objective feedback, and she got hostile and offended. Like I ruined her life over a 3-star rating (or maybe it was 4, but it wasn't a 5).

I feel a lot of pressure to give Fiverr perfect ratings, so I prefer not to leave one if I don't feel they deserved a 5. Then I feel like ratings aren't helpful to other business owners, so they know what to expect. Everyone is different, and expectations vary, but anything less than a 5 is so frowned upon that I won't do it anymore.

People rate you as a buyer, and some of it isn't your fault/subjective. Feedback is where I think the pain is. Fiverr said we won't share the info with the provider, but then the provider gets angry at me. Maybe they didn't see the exact words I wrote, but they got the gist from the lower rating.

I got a dock from a provider because the person said there were some communication issues between us. That's vague and unhelpful. There are cultural barriers. People assume you know things that you may not know. For example, the provider said to add him as a temporary admin to my blog with the SEO report. I didn't realize he was referring to a specific WordPress plugin that lets you set a temporary password.

I've shared a lot about my experience with Fiverr. Have you used it yet? Let me know your experience in the comments and if any of this resonated with you.

Alternatives to Fiverr

Besides Fiverr, I use People per Hour (they practically expect a tip no matter what) and Upwork. I'm happy that Fiverr doesn't guilt us over tips, but they also don't make it standard/easy. I have to say that I've rarely had work that is so good that I'd tip. But I'm deliberately choosing low to mid-priced gigs.

I'm not ready to hire employees, and I can experiment with different people depending on the job. Everyone has different strengths and can't be good at everything.

I still use UpWork for coding/development type work. I've not found a direct correlation between the amount paid to the quality. It seems to be on who you choose, not how much you spend. However, if priced too low, it can be tough to get work done. I'd rather pay more and get it quicker.

Fiverr is excellent at setting clear deadlines, so I know when to expect work back. It doesn't drag on for weeks (on People per Hour, I've had it take months for a few articles). So I'll continue to use Fiverr for certain types of work. I've also hired a virtual assistant to do repeated tasks.

If you know anyone to recommend for the type of work I described, please let me know. It's really tough to share the best people because it usually means the price goes up and/or don't have availability. However, Fiverr helps that by having upgrades like paying extra for faster delivery. I like that too.