Toptal Pricing Overview

It's worth joining Toptal just for the community - the best of the best in many disciplines are a Slack message away. There truly is no comparison between Toptal and other 'freelancer' platforms. Toptal isn't a 'race to the bottom' marketplace where the lowest bidder wins the day. If you can walk the talk, Toptal recruiters will hook you up with clients that are happy to pay a fair price for your skills. Toptal isn't a faceless machine. It's all about the people and some of the best people I've worked with have been Toptal people

Slightly contradicting my earlier point about 'race to the bottom' marketplace, Toptal is a global network and consequently, there will always be similarly skilled people living in lower cost-of-living countries that can do the same job for less. When it comes to deciding your billing rate, you're largely left to your own devices, without knowing what the going rate is. Set it too high and you could sit on the shelf for a long time, too low and you're losing income unnecessarily. I'd like to see a 'zone of possible agreement' feature. Maybe I'll suggest that to the team!

I've been a freelancer for 20+ years. Often working with agents that have no technical skill and couldn't care less which one of the resumes they sent to a client gets picked, as long as they get their percentage. Toptal doesn't work like that. Everybody involved in the organization has a deep knowledge of their clients and the technical skills they're recruiting for. They work with their talent pool to find opportunities to deliver value to organizations large and small. With Toptal you feel that your skills and experience are valued. That's rarely the case with traditional recruitment agents and it's certainly not the case with online freelance marketplaces.

All organisational matters are handled by recruiters. As a specialist you can solely focus on doing your job. The company covers your back, i.e. you are guaranteed to pay provided you did the job even if something happened on client's side whether they can't or for whatever reason don't want to pay.

You can feel the pressure from recruiters when trying to raise your hourly rate. Though this is "expected," - this is something that the company's business model is based on. They charge clients more than talent costs, which lets the company exist and be one of the best remote work marketplaces.

Outsourcing for the most part. Benefits of working with amazing people.

Thanks to Toptal I've got to put my hands on projects that I've never dreamt of. The experience that's come with that has been instrumental to my career development as a product designer.

Toptal allows you to charge whatever you'd like, however, they also charge the client a surplus over your hourly rate. This surplus creates a natural limit to what you can realistically charge a client. That being said, they've still managed to provide me with clients who are willing to pay the highest premium for my services the most throughout the years. As Toptal binds the talent to themselves legally, clients can get frustrated about paying an ongoing fee to an intermediary long term and choose to look for talent elsewhere eventually.

Toptal allows me to connect with clients who'd otherwise be unavailable to me, especially because of location. Its endorsement gives me credibility, so the client finds it easier to trust a contractor, and its policies give me assurance that I'll definitely get paid in the end.

- It is hard to get in, but once you are in this network, there are almost no technical interviews when applying for jobs. They are usually just friendly talks where you find out if you are a mutual fit. - There are a lot of jobs posted every single day. When you are good at some popular programming language or framework, you will find a job in a few days. - There is a wide variety of jobs, from small short-term projects where you are the only person responsible for it to large long-term ones where you join an existing team. - You don't even need to apply for jobs actively. You just complete your profile, set your hourly rate and the number of hours per week you currently have available, and so-called "matchers" automatically reach out to you with relevant job offers. - You can set your hourly rate as you wish. You just need to keep in mind that Toptal charges clients a little extra on top of it. But there is no race to the bottom as most Toptal clients are looking for exceptional talent and can afford to pay for it. - You are paid every other week to your Toptal Pay account, from which you can either send your money to your bank account or top up Toptal debit card and use it for payments. - There is an active Slack community of other freelancers that can help to guide you when you are dealing with some technical challenge. - Toptal supports your growth and reimburses you for taking AWS, Google Cloud, and other certifications.

- Lack of transparency. It is not clear how much Toptal charges clients for your work. - Every change regarding your contract with a given client needs to go through Toptal matcher first. It is pretty strange, especially in long-term jobs where you meet with the client a few times a week and have a much better relationship with them than a matcher has. But you are not allowed to talk directly to your client about changing your rate or similar things.

As a freelancer, you can easily find a new job in a few days. You don't need to go through technical interviews every time you apply for a job. Toptal also takes care of invoicing and payments.

Toptal gives us the opportunity of reaching enterprise clients from abroad, and then it allows us to charge the hourly rate that we want. We don't have to compete with another developers in an auction.

In long-term commitments, the client typically is not satisfied because the Toptal fee is not reduced with the time (even though Toptal isn't actively doing anything at all). Additionally, if the client wants to hire the employee directly, the buy-out fee is really expensive and doesn't decrease with time (which would be logical).

I've been able to reach international enterprise clients keeping a good financial safety, allowing us to become freelancers with much more ease. I'm getting paid much more than what it's typical in my country.

Toptal does all the legwork for you that otherwise would have consumed a lot of your time - finding leads, vetting clients, securing payments - so that you could focus on what you can do best as a professional.

I wish there were a bit more transparency on the fee structure and rate negotiations while interviewing as well as during the engagement. In the long-term engagement, you may end up being locked into a rate much lower than your market value without a clear path to making an adjustment, even though both the client and the freelancer have a mutual understanding that the time is right.

Through TopTal the freelancer has the reach to hundreds of different clients and projects, all aggregated in an easy-to-use dashboard. You pick and choose what you want to work on (given, of course, that you pass the interview with the client). Also being part of TopTal network improves your visibility outside the network through TopTal's outreach and gives you the clout of a "certified" professional in your field.

You have a chance to work with various startups easily.

1) Machine Learning and AI jobs aren't that many. 2) Negative responses after the interview is given without detailed explanation. 3) Toptal charges the clients too much which optimizes the company's profit but the total cost is so high that clients are trying to hire talents directly and the Toptal developers are losing their long-term opportunities. This happened to me now and I want to resolve that issue before continuing on the next engagement.

It solves the issue related to payments. Also connection between client and developer is faster.

Professionality, quality of service, act very quick and communiction is also top

maybe a little pricey for startups as price depends on location of the freelancers.

I needed an accurate market research for my new startup