Hiring without a commission

“No commission” is a claim about where a fee sits. It is not a claim that there is no fee. Every platform that puts a freelancer in front of you is paid by somebody, and the useful question is not whether you are paying but which of four places the payment comes out of — because the four behave completely differently over the life of a working relationship.

The four places a fee can sit

On the work. A share of what you pay the freelancer, taken every time you pay them. It may be charged to you, to them, or to both. This is the model most people mean by “commission”.

On the rate. A markup. The platform quotes you one number and pays the person a different one, and the gap is not shown to either of you. Nothing about it is dishonest — it is how a reseller works — but you cannot compute it from the outside.

On access. A subscription or a listing fee, paid whether or not you hire anyone. It is the only one of the four whose total you know before you start.

Somewhere you cannot see. Free at the point of use, funded by something else: another product the list feeds, advertising, recruitment fees, or an investor waiting for one of those. Free is a business model, not the absence of one, and the thing worth knowing about it is what the list is for.

Placement matters more than size

A fee on the work scales with the relationship. Hire someone for a week and it is a rounding error; keep them for two years and it is a line item that never stops. A fee on access does the opposite: it is at its worst when you hire once and at its best when the same subscription introduces you to several people you keep working with for years.

So the comparison that matters is not which is cheaper this month. It is which one is still charging you in the second year of a relationship you set up in the first.

The four placements, with a named platform in each

Every figure below was read on that vendor’s own page on 2026-08-14 and links to the page it came from. Go and check them yourself — there is a section below on how — because a fee page can change the week after it is quoted, including by us.

On the work. Freelancer.com charges the employer “a fee of 3% or $3.00 USD (whichever is greater)” when a fixed-price project is awarded and “a fee of 3%” on each payment on an hourly one, and charges the freelancer “10% or $5.00 USD, whichever is greater” on fixed-price work and 10% on hourly (Freelancer.com’s fees and charges page, read 2026-08-14). Its own word for the employer’s share is “an introduction fee”. Fiverr charges the buyer a service fee of “5.5% of your purchase amount, plus $3.50 for orders under $200” (Fiverr’s help centre on paying for orders, read 2026-08-14) and tells the seller “you earn 80% of the purchase amount” (Fiverr’s help centre on the earnings page, read 2026-08-14). Two charges, both sides, on the same money. Check the buyer’s half and you may see nothing added at checkout: in some regions Fiverr folds it into the displayed price instead, so that “the amount you see is the amount you pay” (Fiverr’s help centre on price upfront, read 2026-08-14). The fee is charged either way.

On the rate. This is the placement you cannot check, and the evidence for that is what the pages do not say. Toptal publishes no rate for the work on its FAQ, its terms of service or its Platform Subscription Terms (toptal.com/faq, read 2026-08-14). Lemon.io’s own FAQ answers “No upfront fees — you only pay for the work delivered” and publishes no rate schedule (lemon.io, read 2026-08-14). Arc.dev does publish a band — “Freelance hires — $15 - $110+ — Pay per hour” (arc.dev/pricing, read 2026-08-14) — but a band is the price to you, not the split, and none of the three publishes the split.

On access. OnlineJobs.ph charges $69 a month for Pro and $99 a month for Premium, each with a capped allowance of worker contacts, and says on the same page “Hire direct. No salary markups or ongoing fees.” (onlinejobs.ph/pricing, read 2026-08-14). Contra says “Contra is always commission-free for all creatives” and charges a flat platform fee on each client payment instead — $15 under $500, $29 at $500 and over — which drops to nothing where the creative holds Pro, at $199 a year or $29 a month (contra.com/pricing, read 2026-08-14). Mainstay is in this column.

Somewhere you cannot see. The version of this you can check is a free tier attached to a paid product: OnlineJobs.ph’s free plan is $0 with up to three job posts, and the FAQ on that same pricing page asks “Why can’t I contact workers with the free account?” (onlinejobs.ph/pricing, read 2026-08-14). A list with no paid tier at all is funded by something the page does not show you, and the question to ask there is not what it costs but what the list is for.

Two of the platforms named above take no commission, and neither of them is this one. Charging a subscription instead of a commission is not something Mainstay invented.

What Mainstay charges

$49 a month buys 100 contact reveals (pricing). A reveal is one Mainstayer’s email address, phone number and portfolio link; once you have spent it, it is yours for good, and opening the same record again in a later month costs nothing. There is no commission, no per-hire fee, no markup on anyone’s rate and no top-up pack. Freelancers pay nothing at all — no listing fee, no featured slot, no percentage — which is why position on this register is not something anyone can buy.

You pay a subscription instead of a percentage of everything you ever pay them. It is not an argument only this site can make — the two platforms named in the access column above make it as well — and it is not an argument that this is cheaper. It is an argument about what the fee is attached to.

What “no commission” does not tell you

Four things it is silent about, and each of them is knowable if you go and look:

Who pays. A platform can charge the freelancer instead of you. That reaches you anyway, as a higher rate, and it is invisible on your invoice.

What happens at the edges. Currency conversion, withdrawal, payout method, minimum charges. These are usually documented and usually not on the page that says “no commission”.

Whether it applies to work after the first job. Some fees attach to the relationship rather than to the project.

What it costs to take the relationship off the platform. Ask before you need to know.

How to check any platform’s fee yourself

Go to the vendor’s own fee page, not a comparison article — including this one. Note the date you read it. Then answer four questions from that page alone: who is charged, on what base, for how long, and what happens to the fee if you keep working with the same person next year. If the page does not answer all four, that is itself an answer.

What a commission actually buys

Commissions are not bad. A commission funds machinery: an account for the work, money held until delivery, a record of what was agreed, and somewhere to go when it goes wrong. That machinery is real, it is expensive to run, and a percentage of the work is a coherent way to pay for it.

Mainstay funds none of it and has none of it. Money never passes through this site. There is no escrow, no milestones, no dispute mediation, no ratings, no messaging and no contract template. From the moment you have someone’s contact details you are dealing with them directly, and what you agree is between the two of you. That is the trade: nothing is taken from the work, and nothing stands behind it either.

When Mainstay is the wrong choice

You want someone to hold the money until the work is delivered. Mainstay cannot do this. If your protection against a bad outcome is that the money has not moved yet, hire through a marketplace that runs escrow, and pay its commission for it.

You are hiring one person for two hours and never again. $49 for a single introduction is bad value. A productised gig, bought and delivered in an afternoon, is the right shape for that job.

Your budget for this is zero. Free directories exist. If you are willing to do the screening yourself, a free list can be enough, and we would rather you spend nothing than spend $49 to discover that.