I Switched Sides on Freelance Platforms for a Week. It Was a Disaster.

I’ve been a freelancer for many years. I know how it goes from my side: fix up the portfolio, find someone needing your services, write the pitch, send.

I got curious about what it looks like from the other side: as a client. So I made a small design brief for a design project I could use some help with and posted it on Behance.

What came back was worse than I expected.

Me, after reading what I received, needed more coffee

Every Message Looked the Same

By the first day, the messages all started to look the same. A few years ago, pre-GPT, people used to use the same templates. Now it’s different: It feels like a “vibe”. Same opening line, same structure, same sign-off.

Then came the ones that bought the fancy $20 Claude subscription. You can still tell. The writing is the best and cleanest; the layout is neat. They reference the brief and say in 3 perfectly crafted but overly verbose essay paragraphs full of em-dashes why they are the best for your specific project.

Then you follow up, and it’s all broken English. Perhaps they ran out of tokens.

The Follow-Ups All Came at the Same Time

After a few hours of not replying, the follow-up messages started coming in. That part is normal. But they were all arriving at the exact same time. Different designers, no link to each other, all following up within minutes. Same template.

They are clearly using the same tool, I’m not sure what it is. Clawdbot, perhaps?

I messaged one of them and asked if he was sending these automatically, even asked what tool he used. He said no, that “he wrote it all by hand”. He also spelled my name wrong… I believe he wrote that last one.

Multiple People Sent Me the Same Figma File

This is the part that really got me.

I got the same Figma file more than once. Not a similar one. The same file, same link, sent by different people, all acting like it was their own work.

Nobody changed the file name. Nobody looked at it before sending.

I don’t know how that file got shared around. But sending someone else’s work as if it’s yours, without changing a single thing, that’s not just being lazy. That’s a whole other problem.

Me, begging for one good proposal

One Person Got It Right

One message was different from all the rest. ONE. From more than 35.

It was short. It talked about things that were actually in my brief. It felt like a real person wrote it after reading what I posted.

It also had about 30 punctuation mistakes.

It was still the best one I got.

A messy, human message beat every clean, AI slop, copy-paste, auto-sent one in the pile. That’s where things are right now. Someone who writes something real is rare enough that it stands out the moment you see it.

But please don’t start sending messages with typos…

What I Took From This

I’m not trying to tell anyone off. I’m a freelancer too and I know how tiring it gets.

But if you’re sending pitches and not hearing back, this is probably part of why. Clients can tell when a message was not written for them. They can tell fast, and they’re reading a lot of them at once.

Write something real. Talk about their project. Send your own work.