Bidders: letting someone bid on your behalf
How to add a bidder who finds work and sends proposals for you, what they can and cannot do, how seats and invitations work, why this is the right way to delegate rather than sharing a login, and how to remove someone.
As you grow, finding work and writing proposals takes time you would rather spend delivering. A bidder is someone you authorise to do that part on your behalf, with their own login.
What a bidder is
A delegated sub-user attached to your freelancer account. They sign in as themselves and act for you: searching for work, writing and sending proposals, and handling the early conversation.
The work, the contracts, the money and the reputation remain entirely yours. A bidder is an agent, not a partner.
Why this rather than sharing your password
Sharing a login is the thing people do instead, and it is a bad idea for reasons that go beyond policy.
Accountability. With bidder seats, every action is recorded against the person who took it. If a proposal goes out that should not have, you can see who sent it. With a shared password, everything looks like you.
Your money. A shared password is full access to your account, including your earnings and your payout methods. A bidder seat is not.
Your two-factor. Sharing a login means sharing or disabling two-factor, which removes the protection from the account that holds your money.
It is a terms breach, and an account being operated by someone other than its owner is one of the things the platform looks for. Discovering it the hard way costs the account.
Seats exist precisely so you can delegate without any of that.
What a bidder can and cannot do
Can: search for work, write and submit proposals, spend your bids on those proposals, and take part in early conversations with clients.
Cannot: withdraw your money, change your payout methods, access your earnings, alter your profile, or accept an offer on your behalf. The decision to enter a contract stays with you.
That boundary is the point. Delegating the volume work does not mean delegating the commitments.
Seats
Each bidder occupies a seat on your account, and there is a limit on how many you can hold. Seats may carry a monthly price depending on current platform pricing, charged wallet-first and then to your saved card, and shown before you commit.
The limit exists to keep this a tool for a working freelancer delegating their own pipeline rather than a mechanism for operating an account farm.
Adding one
Invite them by email from bidder settings. They receive an invitation and set up their own account with their own password and their own two-factor.
Invitations expire after a period, so if it is not accepted it lapses and you can send another.
Once accepted they can act for you immediately.
Working with a bidder well
Brief them properly on what you will and will not take. A bidder spending your bids on work you do not want is the most common failure, and it is expensive because bids cost money.
Agree a rate floor. Nothing damages a freelancer's position faster than proposals going out below what they will actually work for.
Review the proposals early on. Their writing carries your name and your reputation. Once it is good, step back.
Watch the bid spend. Bids come from your balance. A bidder applying to everything burns through a pack quickly. Set an expectation about volume and check it weekly at first.
Be clear about handover. Decide at what point a conversation comes to you — usually once a client is seriously interested, and always before an offer is accepted.
Removing one
Remove them from bidder settings and their access ends immediately. The seat is freed.
Do this promptly when someone stops working with you. An active seat is an active login, and stale access is the kind of thing that is fine until suddenly it is not.
Proposals they sent remain, because those are your proposals and the client is dealing with you.
Whether you need one
Most freelancers do not. It is worth it when finding work has become a real time cost — you are applying to enough jobs that the hours matter, and the bidder's cost is less than the value of the time it frees.
If you are still building a pipeline, your time is better spent on your profile and on writing better proposals yourself. A bidder scales a process that works; it does not fix one that does not, and delegating a proposal approach that is not converting simply produces more of the same result faster.
Briefing a bidder properly
The difference between a bidder who earns their seat and one who burns your bid balance is almost entirely the brief. Write it down once and give it to them.
What you take. Categories, project types, technologies, sizes.
What you never take. Be explicit. This saves more money than anything else on the list.
Your rate floor, and whether there is any flexibility.
Availability. How much work you can actually absorb right now. A bidder winning four projects in a week you cannot deliver is worse than one winning none.
Tone. How you want proposals to sound, with an example of one you wrote yourself.
When to hand over. Usually: as soon as a client is seriously engaged, and always before any commitment.
Monitoring without micromanaging
For the first two weeks, read every proposal before it goes out if you can, or immediately after. You are calibrating them, and corrections early are cheap.
After that, check the bid spend weekly and read a sample. What you are looking for is targeting drift: proposals going to jobs you would not have chosen. That is the failure mode, and it is quiet.
Agree a rough weekly volume rather than leaving it open. It gives both of you something concrete to check against.
The commercial side
Bidder seats may carry a monthly price depending on current platform pricing, charged wallet-first and then to your saved card. The price and the seat limit are shown before you commit.
Work out whether it pays: the seat cost plus the bids they spend, against the value of the work they win and the hours they free. For a freelancer with a full pipeline this is usually straightforwardly positive. For one who is still building, it usually is not.
What this is not
Two things people occasionally hope bidder seats are, and are not.
Not an agency structure. A bidder cannot deliver work under your account, cannot accept contracts, and cannot receive money. The work and the accountability remain yours. If you want to build a team that delivers, that is a different arrangement and each person needs their own freelancer account.
Not a way to run multiple accounts. A seat is a delegated agent on your account, not a second identity. Using seats to operate what are effectively separate freelance businesses is the kind of pattern the platform looks for.
If a bidder leaves
Remove the seat immediately, not eventually.
Their access ends at once. Proposals they already sent stay, because they are your proposals and the client is dealing with you — you will need to pick up any conversations they had open.
Check which conversations were mid-flight before you remove them, so nobody is left waiting for a reply from somebody who no longer has access. A short message explaining that you are taking over is entirely normal and clients think nothing of it.
Whether the economics work
Work it out rather than assuming.
Cost: the seat price if one applies, plus the bids they spend, plus the time you spend supervising them, which is real and highest in the first month.
Benefit: the hours you no longer spend finding work and writing proposals, valued at what you actually earn per hour, plus any work won that you would not have found.
For a freelancer with a steady pipeline and more demand than time, this is usually clearly positive. For one who is still working out what converts, it usually is not, because you would be delegating a process that does not yet work.
A short trial is the sensible start
Rather than committing indefinitely, run a bidder for a month with an agreed volume and a clear brief, then look at what actually happened: how many bids were spent, how many proposals were sent, how many converted, and how much of your time it freed.
That is enough to know whether it works for your pipeline. If the answer is no, remove the seat without ceremony — it is a tool, not a commitment, and it suits some freelancers and not others.
Common questions
Can a bidder accept an offer for me? No. Entering a contract is yours alone.
Can they see my earnings? No.
How many seats can I have? There is a limit per freelancer, shown in your bidder settings.
Do their proposals use my bids? Yes, from your balance. Agree a volume expectation up front.
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