The quote resets every time you're a new client: PeoplePerHour's commission tax explains why

There's no fixed platform price list on PeoplePerHour: freelancers set their own rates and compete openly for the job. For a small entry-level task like a logo tweak or a single landing page section, a pre-packaged fixed-price "Offer" (formerly called an "Hourly") can start around £10 to £50. That's not what a real business website costs, though. For an actual multi-page brochure site or a basic WordPress, Shopify, or Wix build, expect a custom proposal in the roughly £300 to £1,500 range for something small and simple, and £1,500 to £5,000 or more for a fuller custom site with more pages, integrations, or design work. On top of whatever the freelancer quotes, PeoplePerHour adds a buyer service fee at checkout that most sources put at roughly 10%, so a £1,500 quote lands closer to £1,650 once that's added. Budget for the fee on top of the quote, not folded into it.

Because PeoplePerHour's commission structure punishes new relationships. Freelancers pay a tiered commission based on how much they've billed a specific buyer over the lifetime of that relationship, and the tier resets to the highest rate every time they start with a brand-new client. On the first roughly £250 (about $350) billed to a new buyer, the freelancer pays 20% commission. Between roughly £250 and £5,000, that drops to 7.5%. Above £5,000 with the same buyer, it drops again to 3.5%. A freelancer quoting a first-time client absorbs that 20% cut on the early portion of the job, which is exactly why many pad their opening quote to a new buyer higher than what they'd eventually charge a repeat one. It's not a platform fee you pay directly. It's baked into the price before you ever see it.

A separate charge added at checkout, on top of whatever price the freelancer quoted, shown to you before you confirm payment. Most sources describe it as a flat roughly 10% surcharge on the freelancer's price; one source specifically cites £0.60 plus 10% for card and PayPal payments, which suggests the exact formula may vary by payment method. The 10% figure shows up consistently across sources, but PeoplePerHour's own buyer-fee support page wasn't reachable to confirm the precise current formula against a single authoritative source, so treat this as a solid ballpark rather than a guaranteed number. The practical takeaway either way: budget roughly 10% over the freelancer's stated price, and check the exact figure shown at your own checkout before confirming payment, since it's disclosed there regardless of which formula applies.

No. Like other freelance hiring marketplaces, PeoplePerHour connects you with the person who builds the site; it isn't a hosting company. Whatever the freelancer delivers, whether it's a WordPress build, a Shopify store, or hand-coded files, still needs somewhere to live online, and that's a separate cost you arrange outside the platform. Budgeting realistically means adding your own hosting on top of whatever you pay the freelancer, the same way you would with any independent contractor who isn't also your host. All paid work on PeoplePerHour does run through the platform's own escrow system, called WorkStream, which holds the agreed funds until you confirm the work is done, but that escrow covers payment security, not hosting.

It can, indirectly. Funds a buyer pays sit in PeoplePerHour's escrow system, WorkStream, and release to the freelancer only after the buyer confirms the work is complete. Once released, the freelancer still faces a standard 14-day holding period, and the money isn't auto-paid out; the freelancer has to manually request a withdrawal and then wait another 24 to 48 hours for it to land. That's a cash-flow squeeze on the freelancer's side, not a direct cost to you, but it matters to a buyer indirectly: a freelancer juggling slow, manually-triggered payouts across several clients may be less available for quick turnarounds than the timeline in your proposal suggested. It's worth asking directly about realistic response time on revisions rather than assuming the platform's payment mechanics are invisible to how fast your project moves.

Refund requests go to PeoplePerHour's Payment Team and are typically reviewed within one business day. If the freelancer doesn't respond to your refund request within three business days, PeoplePerHour can auto-release the escrowed funds back to you. That sounds buyer-friendly, and mostly is, but there's a wrinkle worth knowing: if the freelancer wants to formally dispute your refund request instead of accepting it, they have to pay a non-refundable fee to do so, cited at 10% of the disputed amount with a minimum of roughly £5, €7, or $8. That friction discourages freelancers from contesting a request even in good faith, which can cut in a buyer's favor in a genuine dispute, but it also means a freelancer who feels wronged by a bad-faith claim has a real financial reason not to push back. Customer support handling unresolved disputes is also widely described in complaint threads as slow and unhelpful, so don't assume every disagreement resolves cleanly on the stated timeline.

Treat the platform's overall reputation as a mixed and possibly declining signal rather than a settled fact, and judge the individual freelancer instead. Complaint-focused review sites currently paint a much harsher picture of PeoplePerHour than the platform's own, considerably friendlier Trustpilot presence, with a heavy volume of unresolved-dispute complaints logged against it. Reconciling the two pictures into one precise score isn't a task any single number is built for: people with a bad experience are far more likely to show up and leave a rating than people who had an unremarkable, fine one, so any aggregator skews toward complaints by design. What's more useful is checking a specific freelancer's individual review history, response time, and portfolio directly, rather than trusting the platform's brand-level reputation either way, good or bad.

There's a specific risk worth knowing about: reports describe freelancer accounts being deactivated after a single negative one-star review from one difficult buyer, regardless of an otherwise strong track record. From a buyer's perspective, that's not your problem directly until it is: a freelancer you've built a working relationship with, whose lifetime commission tier with you has already dropped to 7.5% or 3.5%, can disappear from the platform over one dispute with someone else entirely. That's a different kind of continuity risk than a freelancer simply getting busy or raising rates. It's a platform-level risk to availability that sits outside either party's control in the relationship you have with them.

In raw dollars, usually yes, though the gap is narrower than a quick glance suggests. Picture a realistic multi-page small business site sourced as a custom proposal in the £1,500 to £3,000 range (roughly $2,100 to $4,200), plus PeoplePerHour's roughly 10% buyer fee, landing the initial build at about $2,300 to $4,600. Add four paid revision requests a year, each taxed the same 10% at checkout, plus separate hosting PeoplePerHour doesn't provide, and a realistic five-year total lands closer to $4,550 to $8,800. A comparable multi-page build from ArdinGate runs $2,800–$5,000 plus managed hosting, for a five-year total of roughly $6,400 to $8,600 on the least expensive hosting tier. On the low end, PeoplePerHour still costs less. On the high end, once several years of edits are counted in full, the two options land close enough together that sticker price alone doesn't decide it. What that comparison leaves out: the new-client commission tax that can inflate a first quote, the platform's currently poor aggregate reputation on complaint-tracking sites, the 14-day payout hold that can slow a freelancer's availability, and the deactivation risk that can end a working relationship over a dispute that had nothing to do with your project.

When the project is small, bounded, and cheap to redo if it goes sideways, or when you specifically want a UK- or Europe-based freelancer for time-zone overlap or European design sensibility. PeoplePerHour is headquartered in London, describes itself as Europe's leading freelance marketplace, and roughly 60% of its members are UK-based, which is a meaningfully different pool than a US-centric platform. A cheap fixed-price Offer is also a reasonable low-cost way to trial a specific freelancer's work before committing to a bigger custom proposal. Where it stops making sense is the moment the site needs to be a durable, revenue-generating asset you'll keep coming back to: something where a freelancer's account could vanish over an unrelated dispute, where support is reportedly slow to resolve real problems, and where every future edit restarts the same 10% fee. At that point, the per-request friction and platform-level continuity risk start outweighing the lower sticker price.