TOS Alerts

The following points to changes in the terms and conditions of popular online outsourcing services. As an outsourcer, you’re going to want to pay special attention to these changes since they may affect your usage of these sites.

Because Elance displays its terms and conditions within a collection of PDF files, its TOS files are not monitored below the way other site TOS files are monitored. To discover changes within Elance’s terms and conditions, consult the appropriate PDF links at the Elance website.

Some of the changes are extremely minor and can be ignored. Note-worthy changes may require you to completely re-evaluate your existing outsourcing strategy. An example note-worthy alert is when an outsourcing service decides to deduct a percentage of unused funds every month without having to notify its users, or when a service decides to charge you for using another, separate service outside of its own.

PeoplePerHour Institutes New Fee Hikes

PeoplePerHour increases its “Opt-Out Fee” from $500 to $825. It also increases its “Violations to Payment Service” fee from $1,000 to $1,650. For more information, read the site’s Terms & Conditions page (sections 4.3 and 4.4) at http://www.peopleperhour.com/terms.php?#business.

General Terms and Conditions Alerts

Alerts cover Freelancer, GetACoder, Guru, oDesk, PeoplePerHour, ScriptLance, and vWorker.

• ScriptLance Terms and Conditions - 05/21/2012
  view change log 37 new words, 53 deleted words, 3% change
  96.996.8% success rate this month 103 146 u [...]
• PeoplePerHour.com - Terms and Conditions - 05/21/2012
  view change log 5 new words, 10 deleted words, <1% change
  ... Top Talent PPH Economy $ Choose curre [...]
• Employer Agreement - 05/13/2012
  view change log 3 new words, 57 deleted words, <1% change
  ... and Founder of vWorker Please note [...]
• oDesk User Agreement - 05/09/2012
  view change log 8 new words, 0 deleted words, <1% change
  ‹ Back to oDesk.com Help Center Knowledg [...]
• Freelancer.com | Online Jobs | Freelance Employment | Outsourcing Services | Programmers | Web D... - 04/18/2012
  view change log 9 new words, 43 deleted words, <1% change
  ... by Freelancer.com at any other time. There sh [...]
• GetACoder - Terms of Use - 03/14/2012
  view change log 0 new words, 5 deleted words, <1% change
  ... result of using the Milestone Services and/o [...]
• Terms of Service - Guru Answers - 12/02/2011
  view change log 21 new words, 26 deleted words, <1% change
  ... Like Guru on Facebook Guru.com [...]

Elance Terms and Conditions Links

The entire collection of Elance’s terms and conditions can be found at http://www.elance.com/p/legal.html. Policies that you should pay particular attention to are:

• Elance’s User Agreement
• Elance’s Billing and Payments
• Elance’s General Escrow Instructions
• Elance’s Services Agreement Between Client and Contractor
• Elance’s Payroll Services Agreement
• Elance’s Refund, Cancellation and Dispute Resolution Process
• Elance’s Site Usage Policy

Independent Alerts

If you haven’t already, register a username for yourself so you can discuss this topic in our Online Outsourcing Services forum.

If you’d like to set up your own TOS alerts (especially for services not listed above), create a free account at the ChangeDetection website, and add the links to the TOS pages that you want to monitor. At this website, you can get change notifications in email, RSS format, or at the site itself.