Upwork is flooded with low-quality freelancers just spamming very low-hourly-rate proposals on everything, and the clients typically lack the expertise to vet candidates appropriately.

The ranking system is gamed to death and is meaningless - all those low-quality spammers are highly rated, so having reputation helps very little.

The spammers driving the rates down also mean that even if you do manage to get a higher-paying gig, the client may have significantly higher expectations than what's reasonable (as they were fed a distorted view of the market).

It's pretty much impossible to live on in Western Europe or the US.

It's been years since I went down this route, but after a while I had a list of clients that were pretty good to work for.

For example, one client had a custom CMS/Webshop that was on its ass. It was a data corruption in their MongoDB (of course...) the code didn't really deal well with. They had contacted two people before who looked at it and said it was "unrecoverable" and nothing could be done. I solved it in an hour, and their business was back up and running. This wasn't act of genius on my part or anything: most people here probably would have been able to do it, it's just that the previous people were the software equivalent of quacks.

Needless to say, I earned a lot of points and trust with that, and did more work for them on various things, at reasonable rates.

But you do have to dig through a huge pile of crap to get these kind of things. Overall, it's not really worth it. Plus the cut UpWork takes is not in proportion to the value they deliver IMHO, so I ended up giving up on freelance work (I'm not the kind of person that's good at "hustling" in the tradition freelance sense).

Yes agreed. I had a single good experience with Upwork as well, but I probably spent more time sifting through the crap beforehand than I actually spent on the task itself, and the platform couldn't even handle charging VAT properly.

Thanks. That is what I thought.

Start at EUR20/hour and increase your price as demand increases.

I have never sold my time on upwork but I have bought thousands of hours of time and I have regularly had freelancers move out of my price range due to demand for their skills.

I’m sure there is a cap but the market is global. It is well above what many could earn locally. Over the years I have seen a convergence of rates in developed and developing nations.

Sounds horrible (at my location). Much better to do regular contracting then.

the standard answer would be, yes but you must have a respectable reputation, as the parent commenter has I assume.

it just bugs me to read these comments that makes it sound so easy to earn that much in upwork or similar platforms without context or disclaimers

Where is €65/h considered expensive for a coding contractor?

You would be competing against all the people who offer the same for 20 EUR. Not saying the quality would be the same, but when freelancing you are basically competing against all the lower cost (and salaries) countries.

I think you need to distinguish it from regular contracting.

Oh you meant specifically for that (kind of) site. Got it.