Ismod, sorry to hear of your experience - but I have to say that your story is not the first I have heard.

Reading this thread and many others like it over the last years I have experienced the rise and decline of the marketplace platforms but I think I have the answer.

First I'll give you some background: I have been working with remote developers since before 2003 paying our first Russian developer using Western Union transfers via the post office. We have used and (mostly) enjoyed at different times freelancer sites like rent-a-coder, odesk, elance, over the years. Upwork upset a lot of people early last year when they killed off our beloved Elance and raised their fees, then started charging hirers as well. At this time I began to question what I was actually using these platforms for? I had over 20 developers all around the world, although I had originally sourced some developers on elance, I sourced most myself from AngelList jobs, LinkedIn, Facebook groups and other channels. I had been onboarding them on Upwork (and copping the increased rate!) so I could have all the jobs in one place and to simply pay them automatically. I liked the tracking features: as although I had huge chunks of money coming out my account each week, it gave peace of mind as at least my developers knew I could dispute charges if they spent too many hours on Facebook ;)
Apart from fees I found the attempts to keep users on the platform annoying and childish. I just wanted to work with my devs on Skype, Slack, email not in their broken site (which was often down at in opportune times).

This got me thinking that the whole process around marketplaces was overdue for disruption. It served us well; however, as many of you pointed out you shouldn’t rely solely on these platforms.

So if you found a job yourself, you don’t need the marketplaces, plus you should be able to create the job yourself instead of waiting for your client.

And it came to me. Instead of marketplaces, we need a direct peer-to-peer platform to simply create a smart contact, with payment and send to the other party. Get all the security of a marketplace: i.e. escrow, tracking, proof of work but without the marketplace fees. This thread is timely as it explains the pain we are solving at http://payninja.co. We are in beta and rolling out new features over the coming weeks: cryptocurrency payments mean you will be able to pay or be paid anywhere in the world. Talking to developers in all counties we are getting excellent feedback, we are seeing that the unbundling of marketplaces back to realworld interactions is the way forward.

Just to clarify, in relation to your particular case, as we are not a marketplace the sources of trust are real, meaning: who referred the client to you, their LinkedIn profile or social network/community where you met them (as opposed to a subjective rating). You would be protected by secured funds in escrow managed for auto release by smart contract. The client would not be hidden behind an anonymous pseudonym that can vanish from the platform without warning and if they did vanish from the internet!.. the funds would be in your account. I hope this gives hope to anyone frustrated with the current state of the freelancing landscape.