Hatchwise Review: Is Hatchwise Worth It for Hiring?
Jason Quey
Updated:
February 15, 2024
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Running a small business takes a combination of skill, experience, and luck. That said, almost one-third of all startups fail because they run out of cash, so ensuring you get a good deal when you’re hiring is valuable. After all, more than half of small businesses fail within five years, often for preventable reasons.
With that in mind, here’s a Hatchwise review to help you decide whether this is the right hiring site for your design needs.
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Hatchwise.com crowdsources designs from creators registered with the site. They emphasize artistic and branding services such as website design, business card design, finding a company name or domain name, and creating slogans. As a result, Hatchwise has become an excellent place for business owners to find graphic designers who are hiring freelance designers for the first time.
Hatchwise is a deliberately international company, with members from around the world. This allows them to offer a wider variety of creative options and ideas, including some you may not have considered before seeing them.
Most projects on Hatchwise fall into one of two categories.
First, standard Hatchwise design contests run for about ten days and allow you to rate and comment on submissions. After submitting a design brief, you’ll get great designs delivered through the power of crowdsourcing. These are public, allowing other applicants to see what you like and don’t like so they can tailor their presentation based on the information you provide.
Second, rush projects can be done in as little as 48 hours. These tend to get more entries than standard projects, though you can expect to pay more.
Freelancers on Hatchwise normally deliver work in Vector format, which means you can shrink or enlarge it, and it will still look just as sharp at any size.
Like most creativity-focused agencies, Hatchwise offers you almost-total copyright control of the work you receive. The one exception to this is that creators retain the right to use their work in their portfolio, though you can always ask them not to if you have a good reason for that.
As with other design-oriented freelancing sites, Hatchwise is not a good choice for different types of freelancing work. Getting dozens of options makes it easy to compare your options, but it’s not as useful for long-term support.
Hatchwise has numerous factors that make it an excellent choice for your design needs. These include:
Hatchwise has two primary time limits for its logo design contests: two days and ten days. However, unlike many competitors, Hatchwise also allows you to extend the contest if you want to get more entries or want someone to make revisions to a current entry. This is extremely useful because art is often unpredictable compared to other types of freelance work.
Realistically, the second choice is the one you’re most likely to use. If you don’t see any designs you like after ten days of submissions, you’re probably not going to get any good ones, no matter how long you wait for contest holders. In that case, it’s better to cancel the contest, revise your instructions, and try again.
Here’s one thing most freelancing websites don’t want you to think about: freelancers on their sites don’t care how much you pay the platform. What they do care about is how much they get paid.
This matters because Hatchwise takes a smaller part of each contest you run than many of its competitors, which allows them to offer higher prices to creatives without compromising their competitiveness.
Money is a significant factor in attracting high-quality freelancers, especially on sites that do contests instead of rewarding work outright. When they offer more, they’ll attract and retain better people. That alone makes Hatchwise worth considering.
Aside from its outstanding revenue share, Hatchwise is also outright cheaper than many other design sites. Like most companies, it charges different amounts based on what you want creatives to provide for you, and you can select different tiers of quality for each category.
However, at the time of this Hatchwise review, their selection system was not working properly and did not display the prices for anything other than business logos. You should always be able to check the pricing for services before you log in, so failures in that category are a mark against the company.
If they’re still having that error when you want to use them, contact them directly and urge them to fix it.
Hatchwise is a good site, but it has some flaws to know about before hiring through them.
This isn’t immediately obvious, but Hatchwise often has fewer designers who submit multiple entries, rather than more designers with one entry each. This leads to a lower variety and inspiration for you to choose from.
All art is ultimately subjective and, to an extent, based on the artist’s experiences and views. Some larger sites have international support from creators and can draw on that for a wider variety of content, including styles you may never have considered if someone else didn’t propose it.
At the lowest end, Hatchwise may provide as few as five different artists for a project, which is extremely low for a crowdsourced creation company. At the higher end, they expect at least 40 artists per project. This is better but still lower than many of its competitors.
This problem is endemic to crowdsourced freelancing sites, but it’s particularly pronounced on Hatchwise. Most creators don’t get any money unless you pick them, which means most of the work they do is wasted. That incentivizes them to spend less time on each sample and more time churning out work for different projects.
As any professional creative designer can tell you, time spent makes a major difference in the overall quality of a job. If they spend more time, you’ll end up with a better, more-detailed final piece than if they have to make it simple so they can complete it in half an hour.
In many cases, you could get a better result for the same money by directly hiring a creator. The only advantage that Hatchwise has here is the variety of samples, which is useful when you don’t already have a good sense of what you want.
Check out our list of Hatchwise alternatives.
Hatchwise uses a straightforward fee structure, with four pricing tiers for each category. These generally have a flat listing fee paid to Hatchwise regardless of the level you choose, as well as a minimum number of designers and samples. As usual for such sites, the prizes are included in your fee.
Unlike many competitors, Hatchwise sometimes offers a custom plan. This is a variable-price option that starts similar to the lowest Bronze plan but has optional upgrades depending on your personal needs. While this isn’t available for every category, Hatchwise may make a custom campaign for you on request.
One detail not shown on the image above is that for many categories, you can select additional designs for a flat rate of $100 each. Most entrepreneurs won’t need these additional choices, but the option does exist if you want to use it.
However, this pricing presents an obvious problem: if you’re starting at the lowest tier, buying additional designs could cost you more than you paid for the first one, which is wildly inappropriate pricing regardless of the circumstances. A scaling fee would be better for everyone involved, or at least a discount for the lowest tier.
By this point in the Hatchwise review, you know far more about the company and what to expect from it. In general, Hatchwise is a decent choice if you’re looking for creative and artistic designs. Its fee structure helps ensure relatively high quality, but it also has fewer designers than most other sites, which can reduce the artistic diversity in the samples you see.
With all that in mind, Hatchwise works best as a budget option when you want to limit your expenses while still getting designs relatively fast. The rush option is particularly useful when you’re on a deadline and don’t want to run a full campaign, and that can make Hatchwise a good backup option even if you prefer to use other sites for most of your creative needs.