We pay $20-25/hr for entry-level developer work and $40-50/hr for intermediate developer work from Eastern European countries, which is super competitive over there. We've got a pair of excellent developers that we've had for a long time and we're extremely happy.

Yeah, if you live in SV and want to make $120/hr on Upwork, go pound sand. But those salaries are pretty good for people who live in modest Midwestern towns or countries that are not America.

There definitely are clients who are happy to pay $40-$75 an hour for senior full stack eng talent. We are such a client, and two VPE friends also commonly use upwork for 1-3 month gigs where they don't want to pay $175/hour for an sfbay contractor. The reason you're not seeing them is good clients eventually find a good contractor and either just run fulltime ongoing work through upwork (for eg payment convenience) or move off upwork.

I was earning $95/hr as a ux UI designer. Now I run a consultancy and charge per project which equates to 260-300$ an hour. Upwork has many issues and limitations but if you do well by good clients you can make it work pretty well.

No one is obliged to bid on such projects. You'll find clients who pay good rates too. I have been freelancing on Upwork since 2010, I never bin on low budgeted projects and usually I'm happy with $35+/hr rates. That may sound to low in US but where I live it is very high pay rate.

I've done a few projects on Upwork in the past. Most of the web development work is WordPress based sites.

Some people have no idea how much it should cost so that's why you see complex sites with only a $500 budget. It's a smaller pool of better paying projects. You're not going to get SV rates but you could make a decent living from.

As for me one of the clients enjoyed working with me and we moved away from Upwork and just pays me directly now. Which I think is a common occurrence, and probably does reduce the amount of higher paying project. Once you find a good developer you tend to stick with them.

I once worked on Upwork. Getting the 1st project is really hard. And seeing quotes of USD 500 for entire fully functional applications was depressing. There were people from India remote places like small city Chandigarh or small town in Kerala or people from Bangladesh who would actually bid for these. I finally asked Upwork for a feature where I could blacklist clients who I thought that the price offered was too low. I wanted a feature like - "dont show me any bids from this client" . But unfortunately Upwork didnt create such a feature