24 Nov 2025 · 5 min
John Jonas explains why OnlineJobs.ph differs from Fiverr and Upwork: it's built for long-term employment, uses a subscription model instead of taking a cut of worker pay, and avoids marking up salaries to protect Filipino workers. The platform serves over half a million employers worldwide.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing. This is episode 313 why OnlineJobs ph is not like Fiverr and Upwork. So I don't get this, get asked this a lot, but I think it's worth talking about. I don't want onlinejobs PH to be like Fiverr or Upwork. Okay? So if I prioritized freelance projects or work freelance work or short term projects, I would probably make more money because employers would need to keep coming back to hire workers. We would take a cut of salaries like Upwork and 5 or 5 or we would have all kinds of rules to keep you on the platform rather than just letting you do whatever you want. I have people tell me all the time that me telling people to cancel their subscription when they hire someone is bad for business. And I don't really care. The reason I intentionally designed OnlineJobs ph to be different from Fiverr and Upwork is because I'm a business owner too. It's what I wanted for myself before I started jobs. PH I was, I was already in business for years and I knew what kind of workers I needed and wanted to grow my business. I didn't want to be locked into a platform. I didn't want to be locked into employee markup forever. I didn't want to be told how I need to communicate and how I need to pay and the whole thing. I wanted to do it on my own. I knew that turnover kills business growth and that Upwork and Fiverr were designed around turnover. If you want to do more things and delegate more, you have to have workers that are loyal and will stick around working with you. Now, if you want easy short term work and time doesn't matter to you, yeah, go use Upwork or Fiverr. If not, I designed OnlineJobs ph to fit. And so it's different than Upwork and Fiverr on purpose. It's not getting closer to them. We're trying to distance ourselves and stay farther away from their model of always marking up salaries and charging fees and increasing those fees. And we try and stay away now the subscription. So I also don't like paying for subscriptions that I'm not using. That's why we make it really, really easy to cancel your OnlineJobs ph subscription to cancel your OnlineJobs ph subscription. Once you've hired someone, you don't have to keep it active. We use a subscription model rather than a commission model because I know that most business owners are in a much, much, much better position financially than Filipino workers are. I know that when 20% of what you get paid gets taken from you by the job board, so like $100 out of every $500 you get paid, it's kind of borderline exploitation. What upwork and fiverr take from people, which is 20 to 40%. Boy, it really adds up. It means they don't buy an extra kilo of rice to feed their kids or they don't pay for unexpected school expenses or hospital bills. And I just don't feel right taking that from people. So I don't want to be like upwork and fiverr. I don't want to be marking up salaries and taking a cut of everything that you pay and that the worker gets paid. I want to keep it simple. Let you hire someone who you want on your terms. You pay them your way, you work with them however you want. You can cut us out of the whole thing. You cancel the subscription with us. Once you've hired someone, you don't have to keep it active. When you're ready to come back and hire again, you pay again, you get access. You. You don't have to pay a markup fee on that worker. When I created onlinejobs ph, in the beginning, things were simple. And then as the business evolved, needs evolved, and so I started creating other things. I created ofsguide.com to answer questions. I created ofstasks.com to show employers what potential work they could get done by people. In the Philippines, I created 1vaoa.com so people knew exactly how. I hire great people and every time. And then last, our most recent thing is vasmadeeasy.com, which is done for you, trainings that you can hand off to the people you hire to help build their trust in you and to get them trained so they're effective for you now. Maybe things will change in the future, But I don't want to be like upwork and fiverr. I want to continue to be the place where people end up after they've tried all the other options. I don't make as much money as I could if I were to mark up salaries, but I'm happy that people stick with onlinejobs ph. I happy to be serving over half a million employers from around the world and providing jobs to people that otherwise would have a really hard time getting jobs and helping those employers build their businesses. Onlinejobs PH is what I wanted and what I still use for every one of my hires. And I hope it's what you want, too.
