I only currently use these services as a buyer (e.g. I pay someone for service)

- Fiverr

- Upwork

- Hackhands

- 99designs

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Horror stories with fiverr:

- Fiverr is some of the worst service I've ever experienced. I had to get someone to do a vector trace. There's only ONE way to interpret a vector trace, you make a vector off an image. Literally, verbatim copy. It took me almost 2 weeks to clarify all the details because the guy didn't speak English. He had good fiverr ratings too... pricing wasn't the lowest nor highest. I wasted 5 hours explaining something that didn't even need an explanation

- I gave someone $200 to make a marketing catalog. I had made a 92 pager and needed to condense it down to 20 pages. Just need to copy paste files I've made, etc. I gave him my .indb fill, full assets, everything, annotated markings of which things to copy paste. One of the highest rated as well. Gave expectations, design guidelines, reference documents to get my point across. Results were so disappointing that I ended up doing the work myself

Good things about fiverr

- Photoshop work. Works wonderfully, I pay someone from UK $5 to $10 an image for high quality work. He tells me how difficult the work will be based on how awful my images are, but its within expectations.

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Good things about 99 designs

- Logo design outsourcing is not bad. I might use it again. Pretty decent for graphics / illustration work. Can't attest to anything else here

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Good things about Hackhands

- Good place for needing quick mentor / technical help on a number of issues I have on projects. Get help within 5 minutes. I have a great guy from India who I pay $1/minute to resolve technical issues I have with MERN stack.

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Good things about Upwork

- Upwork is really nice for the buyer. For sellers (freelancers - I can see why it sucks, its a bidding war). But this is why its so great as a buyer, you can't have the best of both worlds.

- If you know how to spec out a job in upwork (e.g. you know how to do the project yourself, but inefficiently), it makes things miles easier to find good contractors. I usually try to have exact design specifications. I put a short executive summary (one paragraph), followed by a dropbox link with full blown design spec details, reasoning for project, timelines, etc (set expired link to 30 days). The reason I do this is b/c upwork has terrible privacy policies, I never use the attachment button until someone has been hired

- Upwork is fantastic for finding past experience of a seller. I can look through their past projects, and what the design specifications were for that project. Its ripe full of unbiased case studies to learn how many companies operate. Most people don't bother to delete their design specifications from attached dropbox / google doc links

- For an additional $29, you can sponsor the job, it gives you twice the amount of candidates. Not really necessary... but good to know all the same

- As a buyer, I can set the payment schedule, by milestone, etc. So I don't get screwed over, upwork escrow has been great thus far.

- The feedback I get from freelancers is great. Assuming you make a good design specification (e.g. videos, links, .docx files, input/output files). You learn a lot about how a solution can be implemented. You get free consulting service as well... if you are smart you can use feedback from one developer, to ask a question to another. Its such a terrible thing to do, but when you have a job that needs to be fulfilled crowdsourcing answers from experts is not a bad idea. Getting so much feedback lets you effectively estimate how long projects take, with confidence. Because you use statistics to your advantage. Even if you know nothing about the technology stack.

- Example project - I needed to do local batch processing of some files. I was given at least 5 or 6 implementations, various advantages and disadvantages of each method. I paid $50 to get an executable file made via c# and .NET. Another implementation with python.

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There are other services I may try later, or take a hand at becoming a seller. I usually scope things fairly small so I don't get disappointed by the results, and generally don't outsource things I don't know how to do myself though (albeit, inefficiently).