CloudPeeps Review: Is CloudPeeps Worth It?
Jason Quey
Updated:
February 15, 2024
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CloudPeeps has been connecting freelancers and clients since 2014 when its founder, Kate Kendall, launched the site. The freelance marketplace gives startups and established businesses alike the opportunity to hire freelancers rather than full-time employees. But is CloudPeeps worth it?
The answer depends on the quality of your profile and whether you can find jobs on the site. Our freelance platform review will help you figure out if CloudPeeps is a freelancing platform that will work for you.
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CloudPeeps is a freelance marketplace that connects Peeps to Clients. The Peeps are the freelancers, and the Clients post job listings.
The Peeps include independent professionals who offer their services for a variety of remote jobs. These include social media management, SEO, content marketing, copywriting, graphic design, web development, public relations, and more.
Peeps can also create Packages for Clients to purchase. According to the website, Peeps do not have to pay to use the site, but CloudPeeps does get 15% of their earnings from completed projects.
Clients, the employers on CloudPeeps, must create an account to access the dashboard. Once their accounts are set, they can post a job on the site. Before freelancers can apply for it, CloudPeeps has to approve the job. Once the Peeps apply, clients receive notifications. After choosing a Peep, the team can begin working on the project.
Freelancers, the Peeps, search the job board. Like the Clients, Peeps need to create an account. CloudPeeps does not accept everyone who creates an account. The site tends to choose freelancers who are native English speakers and have remarkable freelancing experience or other related job experience and education.
After applying for an account, the people who run CloudPeeps will accept you or not. Once you’ve been accepted, you can then set your profile and begin looking for jobs.
A unique aspect of CloudPeeps is the Storefront, where Peeps can offer their services. In this section, Peeps can build packages, like a preset number of blog posts for X amount of dollars. Clients can buy them and give directions to their newly-hired Peeps.
CloudPeeps offers Peeps two levels: Standard and Pro. Becoming a Pro Peep is an honor that is awarded to Peeps with top talent who achieved remarkable goals. These include:
Pro Peeps never lose their status unless they deactivate their accounts. With the Pro Peeps status, freelancers get a badge to show their skills, higher ranking in client searches, direct matches to clients, and invites to special events and a Facebook Group.
Clients appreciate using CloudPeeps because the platform does not charge them anything for posting a new job. They appreciate being able to access the site and post their jobs for free, especially considering CloudPeeps already vets the freelancers. Having skilled and qualified freelancers makes it easier for clients to find the perfect person for the job.
CloudPeeps shares their success stories, so according to the site, people are connecting and completing jobs. The website offers events called Freelance Fridays in New Orleans, Vancouver, and Berlin. However, to find the events, you have to go off the site to see when the meetings occurred.
Freelancers can offer packages on the website. Unlike the jobs, anyone can search the packages. When scrolling through the packages, users can see how many times someone has purchased them.
A major problem with CloudPeeps involves looking for job opportunities. If you cannot look for jobs before you pay $9, you might question whether jobs are available. Some people might question why they should pay for something if they cannot see if they get anything for their money.
The time it takes to complete the profile is also problematic for some freelancers. CloudPeeps asks for extensive information and a payment of $9 before freelancers can even begin to look for jobs. The CloudPeeps organization must approve the profile, too.
Even after spending significant time building a profile, freelancers are not guaranteed that CloudPeeps will approve them. Once they are approved, freelancers have limited options for job proposals.
After paying $9 per month to see jobs, Peeps can only apply to five jobs per month. Honestly, being able to apply to five jobs does not seem like a justification for spending $9 each month.
While clients do not have to pay to post a job, they are encouraged to pay $150 to promote their listing to top freelancers. Some clients find this to be a little fishy because CloudPeeps already vets their freelancers, so technically, shouldn’t all freelancers be top prospects?
It seems odd that clients have to pay so much to access people who are already considered the best.
Being able to scroll through available packages is a nice feature, but the fact that the packages have been only purchased once or not at all is disconcerting. Not seeing much activity on the packages leads us to believe that people are not making much money on CloudPeeps. Over 1,110 packages were listed, and only 35 had any activity on them.
Peeps had over 50 pages of packages, and customers purchased only eight packages more than once. Customers purchased only 26 packages once. Each of those 50+ pages had 20 packages listed for sale.
CloudPeeps starts as a free site, but users can access more benefits from their tiered pricing structure. If you have a free account, you do not have to pay to use the site; but, you have to pay 15% of your earnings when you finish projects. Unfortunately, if you use the free tier, you cannot see available jobs on the site.
The only way to see available jobs on the site is to pay the $9 Standard fee. Once you pay this fee, you only have to pay 10% of the value of your completed jobs. If you want to lower the cost, you can upgrade to the Plus tier and pay $29 per month. At the Plus tier, you pay 5% of your income from the jobs on CloudPeeps.
If you are an external client or freelancer, you pay an additional 1%. All credit card processing fees are 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. CloudPeeps only lets freelancers submit invoices and collect payments using the credit card service known as Stripe. Therefore, freelancers also lose out on collecting money through Stripe.
Interestingly, CloudPeeps offers samples of prices that Peeps charge Clients. Cloudpeeps suggests prices for hourly, fixed, and one-time projects. For example, they suggest $100 for a Peeps blog post, but $250 for a Pro Peep price.
According to a reviewer on Reddit, clients on CloudPeeps do not always pay. When looking through the CloudPeeps website, payment guarantee information is not available. For freelancers, not having an escrow account or guaranteed payment for submitted work creates a big risk of scams.
The only review on Reddit is from a Peep not receiving pay for completed work. No one has left any positive reviews. This freelancer said he contacted CloudPeeps for help with the problem, and Cloudpeeps would not help them recoup paying from non-paying clients.
Unfortunately, no one has reviewed the platform on G2. This tells our readers a few things. The first is that the site isn’t very popular. The second is that it must not have many users who have been able to leave reviews.
Because of the limited amount of information available to freelancers, CloudPeeps might not be worth their time. The only review on Reddit is a negative one, and freelancers cannot see what jobs look like unless they pay $9 to see them. Yes, $9 isn’t that much money, but it seems suspicious to pay anything to see if any jobs are available.
Consider that over the course of a year, $9 per month totals $108. If there are no work opportunities available, that is a lot of money to spend to get nothing in return.
On a site like Upwork, people who want to learn about the site can look at job opportunities. They just cannot apply to them. It is too bad that CloudPeeps cannot offer a preview of job opportunities to prove that the site is legit.
The section called “Packages” offered a glimpse into client-and-freelancer activity on the page. At the time of this review, freelancers offered more than 1,100 packages. Only about 3% of the offered packages had activity. For freelancers, the chance of being hired through a package is minimal.
Having to pay $9 per month, plus the 10% and invoicing cost through Stripe, increases the cost of doing business on CloudPeeps. All freelancing platforms have to make their money somehow, but CloudPeeps puts all of the pressure on the freelancers. It seems one-sided and not fair to freelancers.
Freelancers who are looking to make money with remote work might look somewhere else. Other freelancing platforms offer more opportunities and previews of those opportunities. Many do not require freelancers to pay upfront, and they offer payment protection against deadbeat clients.