Mainstay vs Upwork

These are not competing versions of one product. Upwork is a marketplace: the work is arranged, contracted and paid for on the platform. Mainstay is a register: you read it, you get someone’s contact details, and everything after that happens between you and them. Comparing the two on price is comparing a bank to a phone book.

The useful comparison is what each one does when something goes wrong.

What Upwork is good at

The transaction rails. Contracts, time tracking, invoicing, paying someone in another country, and a record of all of it. Arranging those yourself is a real cost, and for many buyers it is the whole reason a marketplace exists.

Money held until the work is accepted. This is the important one. If you are hiring a stranger in another jurisdiction, with no contract of your own and no practical way to withhold payment or pursue a claim, a third party holding the money is genuine protection. What that protection covers and what it does not is set out on Upwork’s own pages, and it is worth reading there rather than here. Mainstay does not have it, and cannot build it without becoming a different kind of company.

Somewhere to go when you disagree. A dispute process is not a court, but it is a great deal more than nothing, and nothing is what a directory gives you.

Accumulated evidence. A platform where work is actually done accumulates a history about the people on it: engagements completed, hours logged, clients who came back. That evidence is imperfect and gameable, and it is still evidence. We have none of it — no ratings, no reviews, no work history we can confirm — because no work has ever been done on this site.

What Mainstay is

A directory of independent professionals with a published bar and a weekly clock.

The bar is written down. The standard is seven numbered clauses, versioned, dated and published in full under CC BY 4.0. Every record was read against it before it appeared, and every record prints which clauses it cleared and when.

Identity is checked against a document. No record is published until the person behind it has proved who they are, and the record says which of two things happened: checked against a government-issued document, or checked by a person here. Either way what we keep is the outcome, the issuing country, the document type, and the name on it. The automatic check is run by Stripe, who hold the images: they never reach us, and we cannot ask for them.

The register removes its own stale entries. Every Mainstayer answers a check every week. Miss a week and the record leaves every list a client sees, automatically. Each record prints its twelve-week attendance history (how we verify).

Nothing is taken from the work. $49 a month buys 100 contact reveals (pricing). No commission, no per-hire fee, no markup on anyone’s rate. Freelancers pay nothing, ever, so placement is not for sale. Money never passes through this site: no escrow, no milestones, no mediation, no ratings, no messaging.

The fee comparison

The structural point first: a subscription is charged on the introduction, a commission is charged on the work. One stops. The other is still charging you in the second year of a relationship it introduced once — and on Upwork the second year is not a figure of speech.

Now the figures. Every one of them was read on 2026-08-14 on `support.upwork.com`, which is the half of Upwork’s own documentation a browser can reach; `www.upwork.com` returned HTTP 403 to a real browser session, so the User Agreement is not quoted here at all.

There is no single number to compare against $49. Upwork publishes ranges on both sides. A client on the free Basic plan pays “a Client Marketplace Fee of up to 7.99% on all payments you make to freelancers”, with one named case beneath the ceiling — “a reduced Client Marketplace Fee of 3%” for qualifying U.S. clients paying from a bank account — and the fee “is not refundable, even if a payment is reversed or refunded” (Upwork’s Client Marketplace Fee article, read 2026-08-14). Business Plus is “a 10% fee* on all freelancer payments”, and “some U.S. clients may qualify for a reduced 8% fee by paying with a checking account” (Upwork’s Business Plus fees article, read 2026-08-14). Starting a contract costs “a one-time Contract Initiation Fee ranging from $0.99 to $14.99 USD”, varying “depending on factors such as contract type, account history, and hiring activity” (Upwork’s Contract Initiation Fee article, read 2026-08-14). The freelancer pays separately: “the fee ranges from 0% to 15% per contract”, set by Upwork and fixed once the contract begins (Upwork’s Freelancer Service Fee article, read 2026-08-14). Both sides are charged on the same money, and what the freelancer pays reaches you in the rate.

What the fee buys, in Upwork’s own words. The same page says the Freelancer Service Fee “helps us provide you with payment protection, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and all the tools that help you run your business more smoothly”. That is a real list and this site has none of it. What the protection actually covers, and on what conditions, is set out in Upwork’s User Agreement, which returned HTTP 403 to this session — so it is not summarised here, and you should read it in your own account.

What leaving costs. Upwork’s “Terms of Service require you to keep all work and payments on Upwork for the first two years”, and the fee for taking a relationship off the platform inside that window is “13.5% of a freelancer’s estimated annual earnings” — the hourly rate times 2,080 hours. Upwork’s own worked example is a freelancer at $30 an hour: $62,400 estimated, $8,424 billed (Upwork’s Conversion Fee article, read 2026-08-14).

That last one is the comparison, and it is not really about price. Mainstay’s entire product is an introduction. There is no window, no exclusivity and no conversion fee, because the day you have someone’s contact details this site has already done everything it does. Cancel and the contacts you revealed stay yours.

Two different meanings of “checked”

On a marketplace, the evidence about a stranger is behavioural: what they have done on the platform and what other clients said about it. It is real evidence, and it takes time to accumulate, which means a new person has none of it.

Here the evidence is documentary: a published standard, a record read against it before publication, an identity checked against a government document, and a weekly confirmation that the person is still around. It applies to every record from the day it appears — and it says nothing whatsoever about how good anyone is at the work. Neither kind of evidence substitutes for the other, and a buyer who wants both should use both.

When Mainstay is the wrong choice

You want the money held until the work is delivered. This is the clearest disqualifying case there is. Use a marketplace with escrow. We hold nothing and mediate nothing, and if you pay someone and they disappear, there is nobody here to appeal to. Tell us — every record carries a report link and a person reads it — but a report changes what happens to a record, not what happens to your money.

You want a rating history to read. There are no reviews here. If a track record on the platform is how you decide, this register cannot give you one.

You are hiring once, briefly, and never again. A month of access to introduce one person is poor value against a percentage of one small job.

You want the platform to be a party to the agreement. We are not. If you would rather someone else’s rules governed what you and the freelancer agreed, that is a legitimate reason to use a marketplace.