Upwork Alternative With the Top 1% Instead of 100 Bids

SuperGig is an Upwork alternative that replaces open bidding with a vetted top 1% pool. Send one brief, get a hand-matched shortlist of 3 in 48 hours, and pay through milestone escrow released only on your approval.

See the side-by-side table

<1 in 20 vetting bar 48h to a shortlist $0 released before you approve

Maya K.

Senior Full-Stack Developer

96% match

$120/hr ★★★★★4.9

React Node.js

What a match looks like

Every card in your shortlist already passed a 4-stage screen. No bid, no proposal template, no guessing.

Side by side

SuperGig vs Upwork, on the things that decide a project

What you care about	Upwork	SuperGig
Vetting bar	No vetting floor. Anyone can open a profile and bid on your job.	4-stage screen: portfolio, skills assessment, live project simulation, references. A bar built to pass fewer than 1 in 20.
How you find talent	Post a job, then sort 100+ unvetted bids yourself.	3 hand-picked matches delivered in 48h. No job post, no bid pile.
Fees	Client fee of 3 to 10% by plan and payment method, a per-contract fee up to $14.99, plus a 0 to 15% freelancer fee taken out of the person doing the work.	$349 a month for a project post, no project fee, published on the pricing page. Talent keeps 100% of their rate.
Payment protection	Payment protection with a dispute process if a deliverable goes wrong.	Milestone escrow: funded before work starts, released only when you approve.
Quality consistency	A very wide range. Excellent freelancers exist, but they sit in the same results as everyone else.	Every profile already passed the same bar, so the floor is high and predictable.
Time to start	Days of posting, filtering and interviewing before work begins.	Shortlist in 48h; most projects start within a week.

Upwork fee figures are the typical published ranges and vary by contract type, so treat them as approximate and check their current pricing. Every Upwork client fee, with the monthly spend where each plan beats a flat fee, is laid out on our Upwork pricing page. Our numbers are the same everywhere on this site: the full freelance marketplace fees breakdown is public, and the 4-stage bar is documented step by step. If a vetted network is the other option you are weighing, we reconstructed Toptal pricing the same way, deposit and subscription included. Every client-side fee in the category sits in one table in freelance platform fees for clients, including the platforms that charge less than we do.

The honest math

What a $6,000 project actually costs on each

Same brief, same $6,000 agreed price. Here is the full bill on both platforms, with nothing hidden in either column.

On Upwork

Typical

Agreed project price: $6,000
Client fee, 3 to 10%: +$180 to 600
You pay: ~$6,180 to 6,600

The freelancer also pays platform fees out of the $6,000, so the person doing the work keeps less than the sticker price. Top performers price that in.

On SuperGig

Published

Agreed project price: $6,000
Business plan, one month, no project fee: +$349
You pay: $6,349

The freelancer keeps the full $6,000. Every dollar sits in milestone escrow and releases only when you approve the work.

The number nobody bills you for

Rework on a bad hire

On paper the two land within a few hundred dollars of each other. But if an unvetted hire misses and you redo a third of a $6,000 build, that is roughly $2,000 extra plus lost weeks, and the hours you spent screening 100 bids were never on any invoice either.

With escrow for freelancers, a milestone you never approve is a milestone you never pay for.

The monthly spend where a flat plan beats the Upwork fee

Divide our fixed fee by Upwork's client percentage. Below the number, Upwork's fee is the smaller bill and that is the honest answer. Above it, the flat plan costs less every month, and the gap grows with spend.

Monthly freelancer spend at which a flat plan costs less than Upwork's client fee
Upwork plan and payment	Client fee	Break-even vs $349 monthly	Break-even vs $174, billed yearly
Upwork Basic, ACH	3%	$11,633.33	$5,800.00
Upwork Basic, card	5%	$6,980.00	$3,480.00
Upwork Business Plus, ACH	8%	$4,362.50	$2,175.00
Upwork Business Plus, card	10%	$3,490.00	$1,740.00

Fee rates as Upwork lists them for clients in 2026, before the per-contract initiation fee. The full fee breakdown is in our Upwork pricing and fees for clients page.

Vetted developer networks do not fit this table, because they put their cut inside the hourly rate instead of adding a fee line. Arc.dev lists $15 to $110 an hour with a 20% fee to hire full time, Lemon.io reports $45 to $80 with a week or a month prepaid, and the nearshore agency in BairesDev pricing lists $50 to $99 with a $50,000 minimum project.

Fair is fair

When Upwork is the better choice

Upwork is the largest freelance marketplace in the world for a reason, and for some jobs its model is genuinely the right one. We would rather you pick the right tool than the loudest pitch.

Tiny budgets. For a $50 to 300 task, a curated shortlist is overkill. Upwork's scale and low entry point serve that end of the market well.
Micro-tasks and quick one-offs. Data cleanup, a single logo tweak, an hour of scripting: fast, gig-shaped work is what an open bid pool does best.
You enjoy running your own screening. Some teams have a tested interview funnel and want the widest possible top of it. Upwork gives you the biggest pool anywhere, and if that process is your edge, keep it.

If your project is measured in thousands of dollars and weeks of work, read on: that is the job we built for.

Why teams switch

The quality lottery is the real fee

Teams rarely outgrow Upwork over the percentage. They outgrow it because every project starts with a gamble: 100+ bids, no vetting floor, and a week of screening before anyone writes a line of code. What they want is simple: Toptal-grade talent with Upwork-simple hiring, and escrow that only releases when you approve the work.

You hire freelancers here the way you would from a trusted referral: vetted freelancers across five disciplines, rates printed on every card, and a shortlist matched to your stack and budget in 48 hours. Because talent keeps 100% of their rate, the best people stay, and the fee structure never pushes them to pad prices.

Weighing the premium networks instead? Read our Toptal vs Upwork breakdown or the Upwork vs Toptal head-to-head, or see how SuperGig stacks up as a Toptal alternative or a Fiverr alternative. If Fiverr is the other option on your list, check the Fiverr fees for buyers first.

Escrow receipt

Milestone 1 · Storefront rebuild $2,000

Funded by Verified client

Released on approval ✓

Not right after all?

Free rematch guarantee: a new shortlist within 48 hours, and disputes are resolved by a human within 3 business days.

Switching from Upwork

Move your next project in three steps

01

Bring your brief

The same brief you would post as an Upwork job works here. Paste it in, add a budget band and timeline, done in 10 minutes.

02

Shortlist in 48 hours

Instead of watching bids come in, you get 3 hand-picked, pre-vetted matches with public rates and verified ratings.

03

First milestone in escrow

Pick your freelancer and fund milestone 1. Work starts, and money releases only when you approve the deliverable.