TOS Alerts

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.

Sample: 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 RentACoder.

• Tweet Freelancer.com - Hire Freelancers & Find Freelance Jobs Online - 05/24/2013
  view change log 883 new words, 941 deleted words, 58% change... . Witters FREELANCER CONTESTS From just Get more than 50 logo designs from only 30 USD, get hundreds of ... for one you l [...]
• Tweet Terms - 05/15/2013
  view change log 416 new words, 681 deleted words, 12% change... up User Agreement Last modifiedUpdate April 17May 14, 2013 , effective May 14, 2013 This update principally eliminates re [...]
• Tweet Freelancer.com | Online Jobs | Freelance Employment | Outsourcing Services | Programmers | Web D... - 04/23/2013
  view change log 24 new words, 73 deleted words, a outside of Freelancer have been picked ... picked a Freelancer for. com. This includes giving out your email address, Skype ID, ICQ num [...]
• Tweet Terms and Conditions - People Per Hour (PPH) - PeoplePerHour.com - 11/29/2012
  view change log 48 new words, 48 deleted words, 1% change... by Categories All Categories 18305 18460 Design 4247 4269 Web Development 2340 2367 Writing 1986 1997 Business Support 1849 [...]
• Tweet GetACoder - Terms of Use - 10/17/2012
  view change log 0 new words, 2 deleted words, 2012 GetACoder. All rights reserved.
• Tweet Terms of Service - Guru Answers - 12/02/2011
  view change log 21 new words, 26 deleted words,

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.