If you are an employer looking online for freelance talent to get your work done, be it programmers, designers, testers or anyone else, chances are that being cost-effective or efficient is one of your reasons.If you aren't worried about the costs, you'd probably be hiring the old fashioned way by posting a newspaper ad and conducting an offline interview like many companies do. Now, what's the use of going online if platforms like Upwork eat away most of your savings?First of all, there is the 2.7% processing fees that Upwork charges from all their clients. For every $1000 you spend, $27.5 goes down the drain. Then the freelancer you hire is deprived of 20% of their earnings the moment you award him/her the project! For a $1000 project, $200 is taken by Upwork as commission and only $800 is earned by the freelancer as net income!Such a high amount of commission isn't justified for a platform which is simply a middleman and facilitator. Upwork doesn't do any real work here, all they do is provide a PHP web app where you can sign-in and find freelancers/employers.But why pay for this costly app when several social networking sites like Linkedin, Reddit and Twitter allow you to do the same for free! Granted that finding a reliable freelancer on your own can prove to be tricky sometimes, especially if you don't have any searching/filtering skills. But honestly, the quality of both clients and freelancers has degraded so much on Upwork lately that if you can find a reliable freelancer on Upwork, you can easily do the same on any other platform too.Linkedin is the place where most freelance professionals have a profile which describes their work experience, past projects done and endorsements and recommendations given by clients and/or colleagues. Here is my Linkedin profile , for example. Many freelancers also have their own website, these days, I have mine too Then, you also need a project management platform to actually manage your work (alternative to Upwork's team room). For this, there are many tools, both online and self-hosted like Trello, Asana, Basecamp, OpenProject, OrangeScrum, etc.Finally, there comes the question of paying the freelancer after getting the work done. Most popular options here are PayPal and direct wire transfers. You can ask the freelancer's PayPal email or bank account details and transfer them accordingly. Other options also exist like Payoneer, Stripe and Google Pay.Moral of the story is why allow a platform to get rich at your expense when the same money could be used to hire a better freelancer or getting more work done!