About Us
Why this site exists
INTERNATIONALFREELANCERSDAY, published at internationalfreelancersday.com, is an independent publication about freelancing and remote work. Most writing about freelancing falls into one of two buckets: marketing copy produced by the platforms themselves, or listicles assembled by people who have never sent an invoice, chased a late payment, or watched a service fee eat a fifth of a project. We try to sit in a third place. We write about the working end of independent work: what platforms actually charge once you do the arithmetic, what people in a given field actually earn rather than what a survey headline implies, and what registering as a self-employed person actually involves in practice.
The name comes from International Freelancers Day, the informal observance celebrating independent workers, but this is not an events site. It is a year-round working publication for people who earn their living outside traditional employment.
Who we write for
Our readers are working freelancers and remote workers, and people seriously weighing the jump. They live in dozens of countries, bill in different currencies, and sell very different skills, from writing and design to development, bookkeeping, translation and support work. What they share is a set of unglamorous, recurring questions. Which platform takes what cut, and is the cut worth it. What a realistic rate looks like for this skill at this experience level. Whether that tax threshold applies to them. Which tool is worth paying for and which one is a subscription that outlived its usefulness. We aim every article at someone who has thirty minutes between client calls and needs an answer they can act on, not a motivational essay.
How we started
The site is run by a small team of editors, all of whom have freelanced or still do. Before this site existed, we kept the kind of private notes most freelancers keep: a spreadsheet of platform fees with the dates we last checked them, a folder of screenshots of pricing pages taken before they quietly changed, half-written explanations of VAT registration that we sent to friends who asked. At some point it became obvious that the public information on these subjects was worse than our notes. Fee comparisons online routinely disagreed with the platforms’ own published schedules, usually because the comparison was written once and never touched again. Rate guides quoted numbers with no source, no date and no indication of who was surveyed. We decided to publish the notes properly, with the checking that publishing demands.
The mistake that wrote our rulebook
Early on we published a rate guide that quoted an average hourly figure for freelance writers, taken from a survey we had read but not read carefully. The survey mixed rates reported by established agency subcontractors in one high-income market with rates from independent freelancers worldwide, and it reported a mean, which the handful of top earners dragged upward. A reader wrote to tell us she had priced a proposal off our number and been laughed out of the conversation, because in her market the figure was roughly triple what experienced people charged. She was right and we were wrong, not because the number was fabricated but because we had stripped it of everything that gave it meaning.
That correction became the desk’s first standing rule, and it still shapes everything we publish. Every number on this site carries its source, the date the data was collected or the date we verified it, and a plain statement of who it describes. A median beats a mean unless we explain why not. A rate is meaningless without a market, a skill level and a year attached to it. When we cannot supply those things, we do not publish the number.
What we cover
The site is organised into sections that map to the questions freelancers actually have:
- Careers: building and sustaining a freelance career, positioning, finding and keeping clients.
- Guides: step-by-step explanations of the recurring tasks of independent work.
- Industry and News: what is changing in the freelance economy, and what it means in practice.
- Platforms: how marketplaces and job platforms work, what they charge, and how they compare.
- Rates: benchmarks and pricing, always sourced and dated.
- Remote Work: the practical side of working from anywhere.
- Tax and Legal: the basics of registration, invoicing, contracts and tax for independents, always with the caveat that rules vary by country.
- Tools and WordPress: the software freelancers run their businesses on, including the WordPress stack many of them build client sites with.
How the desk runs
Every fee figure is checked against the platform’s own current published schedule, not against another blog. Every tax claim is checked against an official government source, and labelled with the country and tax year it belongs to. Platform guides state when we last verified the details, because fee structures change quietly and often. When a platform changes its pricing, updating the affected articles goes to the top of the queue. Our fact-checking policy and editorial standards describe this in detail, and our corrections policy describes what happens when we still get something wrong.
How we pay for it
The site earns money from display advertising and from affiliate commissions on some links to products and platforms, disclosed on the page and explained fully on our ownership and funding page. No platform, marketplace or tool vendor owns any part of this site, and none of them sees our coverage before it is published. Affiliate status never determines what we recommend; several of our top recommendations pay us nothing.
What we will not do
- We will not publish income claims we cannot verify, our own or anyone else’s.
- We will not present a sponsored post as independent editorial. Sponsored content is labelled.
- We will not rank a platform higher because it has an affiliate program, or lower because it does not.
- We will not give individual tax or legal advice. We explain how systems generally work and tell you when to talk to a licensed professional in your country.
Talk to us
The team is reachable at support@internationalfreelancersday.com for corrections, story ideas, questions and complaints. We are a small desk and we read everything, even when a reply takes a few days. If you spot a fee table that no longer matches reality, that email is the fastest way to get it fixed, and we genuinely want to know.
