Last updated July 29, 2026
This article is part of a series on: Making Money Online with Freelancer.com
In my opinion, and experience, the most money you can make from Freelancer.com is hiring people to do CAD work for you. As stated in a couple of Freelancer.com’s Youtube videos, the vision is: digitizing work and sending it to the other side of the world for 10 percent of the cost. Or sending digital work from high GDP countries to low GDP countries.
Interestingly the video on New Zealand Matt Barrie, CEO and founder, states 15% of work in New Zealand is to other people in New Zealand. So not all the work is going from richer to poorer countries.
Are we going the charge our clients 90% less because we have outsourced parts of our projects – NO WAY! So by this simple measure, that is how you make the most money online with Freelancer.com
From my own experienced, previously we used an agent to get hand drawings converted to AutoCAD. Forget that now, Freelancer.com is better for a number of reasons:
- It’s heaps cheaper.
- You work directly with the drafter. No agents or middle people.
- You can use the same person multiple times. After a while you have a nice little core of drafters to spread the work around too.
- Freelancer.com’s system protects both employers and employees from fraud and non-payments. Which in my opinion is why I will continue to use Freelancer.com
- Large files can be transferred with the Freelancer.com system. Drafters often have an issue with 10mb+ plus files on email systems. Not a problem with Freelancer.com
How to hire on Freelancer.com
To say it simply: You post projects on Freelancer.com and freelancers bid for projects. Here is a screen shot example, of a CAD project brief, for freelancers to bid on:
You select a winning bidder, from normally a good size list. An example of this follows:
They do the work. You release payments at pre-set milestones throughout the project life. Small jobs may only have one milestone. But typically I set something like, milestone payment at 50% of fee for check of floor plans. Elevations and balance of project in final milestone payment.
FEEDBACK and RATINGS
Very important to the working of the Freelancer.com system is feedback and ratings on employers and freelancers performance. All this feedback is open to all. I am sure you will always have the odd job which didn’t work out that well, but long term users of Freelancer.com should have a rating close to 5 stars and good reviews. I like this bit of Freelancer.com. Lemons and fraudulent punters just don’t last long on this system.
Case study
We placed a project on Freelancer.com to convert old hand drawn files on DWG AutoCAD. How did it work for us? READ MORE…