Ep. 356: How much does it cost to hire from Onlinejobs.ph?
24 Nov 2025 · 8 min
John Jonas breaks down OnlineJobs.ph costs: a one-time $69 fee to mark hires, plus typical Filipino salaries ranging from $3-8 per hour for beginners to $15-25 for experts. He compares it to Upwork's 10% take and wage inflation.
Questions this episode answers
$69 (one-time)
About 10% of the wage
About $3 per hour up to $30 per hour (ballpark)
Approximately $400 per month up to about $2,000 (typical range); experts can go up to $2,000–$2,500
Around $5–$8 per hour (very common)
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 356, how much does it cost to hire from OnlineJobs? Ph. So there are two different questions in this question. How much does it cost to hire from onlinejobs Ph? So the first question is what does it cost to get access to people? And then the second question is, what are salaries like? So I got this. The first question of this stems from an email that I got from Mark. So Mark says, I'm in Australia and I have someone working for me via upwork in the Philippines. They are full time. Can you please tell me the cost of having them employed through you? So I've talked in greater detail about why onlinejobs ph isn't like upwork, and I'm going to have more thoughts about Upwork in the future. But for right now, I'll just tell you really simple. It'll cost you $69. Now, $69 might seem like a lot to have someone employed through us, considering that upwork is free, but upwork is not really free. So that $69 is one time you need to pay to upgrade your account one time so that you can mark people as hired. In our system, we don't allow people who have never upgraded to mark someone as hired, because how would you have hired someone if you haven't upgraded before? And we were finding abuse of the system of people marking workers as hired and then leaving a review for that worker because they marked him as hired and then unhiring them even though they had never. Yeah, it was a big scammy mess and we cleaned it all up and we found a solution to it. So you have to have upgraded your account at least one time in order to mark someone as hired to bring them to our platform from upwork. So now let's talk about upwork's freeness. First of all, upwork isn't free. They take a cut of the salary you pay that person, which means wages are inflated at upwork to account for that, and not only to account for it, but to account for the temporary nature of Upwork's platform. So I was just looking at upwork and the lowest wage that I saw. Now, I'm not sure this is the lowest wage you'll find, but the lowest wage that I saw for the thing that I was looking for was $10 an hour. Now, at Onlinejobs ph, $10 an hour is really a high wage. And at Upwork that was the lowest wage. So when you say that upwork is free, well, I mean they're taking 10% of the wage that you pay that person. So it's already inflated by 10%. But then when you account for how it's so focused on short term work, well, the wages are inflated even more then so it's really not free. And on the jobs, ph, we do not mark up salaries. We don't take a cut of their wages. We don't take a cut of what you pay them. You can pay them through PayPal or you can pay them through Wise. You can also pay them through online jobs Easy Pay, which is a really, really great system for paying people in the Philippines. But we don't add any markup there to them. You pay one time $69. You consider a recruiting fee. You can cancel it when you're not recruiting someone. So if you're just moving someone to the platform to avoid Upwork's 10% fee, that's fine. Pay it one time and then immediately cancel it and preferably pay it one time when you want to hire someone else. So you can pay it and use your month of hiring, hire someone else and then you can also bring that person onto the platform. Okay, so now let's get back to the second question in this. How much does it cost to hire from onlinejobs? Ph, so the second side of this is how much are salaries on onlinejobs? Ph, so let me just start with saying a general range of you'll find people at about $3 an hour up to $30 an hour. And generally a full time salary will range from around $400 per month US dollars to about $2,000 a month. Now those, those hourly amounts don't exactly correlate to what I'm saying. I'm just giving you ballpark ranges. So around $400 a month you have someone who's a beginner. They don't really know very much, they're not experienced, they probably speak English, they're probably dedicated and willing to work hard and eager to learn. And that's really great. We have a lot of really successful employers who are, who only hire beginners because they know that person's going to show up every day, they're going to be dedicated and they're going to learn the company culture from you, they're going to learn how to work from you. And that's how they're going to work for a really long time. And hopefully they're going to work for you for a really, really Long time. Now, if you want someone more experienced, you start to get that with 600, 700, 800, 900, $1,000 a month, you're going to get people who are, who have quite a bit of experience. Their English can be really great. Obviously English isn't the primary concern if you're hiring a graphic designer or a program or something like that. But for a social media marketer or for someone writing Amazon descriptions or someone who's going to be a general virtual assistant, then yeah, you want really good English. And so for that person, you're looking at probably 700, $800 a month for full time work. Now that number is definitely higher than it used to be. Wages have definitely gone up in the Philippines. Now let's talk about the expert level. This does not apply to me for like a data entry position. Data entry doesn't have an expert level for me or a virtual assistant. There are definitely people who are better at it than others, but for the most part you're going to have to teach them what you want in your business. And so hiring an expert virtual assistant isn't really going to lessen your amount of work by very much. It's just going to increase your cost. So for expert level, I'm looking at more like someone who's expert at Facebook advertising, running Facebook ads for you where you don't have any idea what you're doing. And they do, they know what they're doing, or a Python programmer, or a PHP programmer, or a system admin, or a video editor. Someone who's really, really good at video editing rather than someone who understands what Adobe Premiere is or how to use it because they took a class in college. So now in these situations, for an expert, you're looking at $800 up. Now that could go up to like 2,000 or $2,500 a month. You can also find that expert on the lower end at like $800 per month. Now you don't have to pay a salary for any of these things. You can find a video editor to edit your videos for you part time or hourly. And you just pay them the hourly wage that they're asking for. You can negotiate an hourly wage. They're asking for $10 an hour. I'm not suggesting you offer them four, but you may negotiate that somewhat. I recently had someone asking for $10 an hour who I hired at $6 an hour because I knew her $10 an hour was inflated beyond what it should be. Probably because she's seen some social media influencers saying oh you can charge $10 an hour for something which that is something to be aware of. There are influencers in the Philippines making a lot of money selling garbage training courses to people and promising that they can make 10 to $15 an hour once they've gone through their training course. It's really a terrible situation. It's causing silly inflation of wages for skills that don't exist and it's just something to be aware of. So what does it cost to hire from onlinejobs? Ph well that depends on whether you're hiring a beginner or an expert or something in between but generally the range is three to $25 an hour where $5 an hour range is is pretty stinking common. Five six, seven, eight an hour is very common. $10 you start to get on the high end of things or it could be like $400 a month full time up to $2,500 a month full time. I hope that is helpful to you. And what does it cost to hire from onlinejobs? Ph.
