My first experience using Fiverr
I’m currently on a sabbatical from work and decided to invest some of my time off reliving my teenage dream of creating enough music to publish an EP of some form.
In order to give myself a bit of a vision to aim for, I decided to create a logo for the name I’d be putting music out on, however I don’t have the artistic understanding of how to create a Death Metal style logo so I thought I’d give Fiverr a try after seeing services advertised on there.
Note: I’ve decided to not link to the service I bought because I want to be frank about the process and don’t want to negatively impact their listings
The process
I found an artist who was only charging £8 for their base-tier service and decided to opt for their mid-tier, as a logo for £8 felt way too low a price for the time they’d need to invest in creating the logo.
After purchase I was asked to provide some requirements for the logo so I created a .txt file with some bands to draw inspiration from and the name of the band. I was then given a delivery date for the logo once I provided the requirements.
Within a day the artist came back with a rough sketch of the logo and I was able to provide feedback using Fiverr’s tool to annotate the image with comments.
The artist replied to the feedback and suggested that with the delivery deadline looming that it was best to wrap these into the final delivery. I was more than happy to do this because at £12 I didn’t want them to spend ages on amendments.
A day later I received the logo with some of the amendments in the formats defined (transparent PNGs and a vector).
The good
For someone like myself who doesn’t have the time to build up the skills needed to create such a logo, using Fiverr has given me the opportunity to get something I can use for a low enough cost that I’m not losing anything if the result was bad.
I see the work delivered as a base for myself taking the time to create the final logo, as while I can’t create such a logo I can work off the one I received and I’m more than happy for this to be the case given the cost.
The bad
As someone who works in the software development industry I hate deadlines. The fact that as soon as I had delivered my requirements there was a clock ticking down meant a couple of things for me:
- The artist providing the service will likely get penalised if that deadline is not met
- I’ve created stress in this person’s life, for a very low cost which, while that person has priced their time, that pricing would be influenced by Fiverr’s ranking algorithm
- If I had provided hard to understand requirements this would have eaten up a lot of the artist’s time
For services like the one I purchased I don’t think it’s really necessary to add the stress of something like a deadline to what I would already consider a low cost of someone’s time and through conversation with the artist it was clear also that there was a need to wrap up the delivery to meet that deadline.
I can’t help but think that the low pricing and deadlines are a symptom of the gig-economy marketplace and are needed to game the ranking order on the Fiverr site. This creates a promise which was evident had to be met in order to maintain a high ranking.
I’m also not entirely sure how much of that £12 went to the artist. Fiverr added a ‘service fee’ when I paid and tipped but there’s no indication if paying this meant the artist gets the full amount or Fiverr is then charging them money. The same goes for if they didn’t meet the delivery deadline, would they be charged?
The (purposely) ugly
I’m really happy with the work that was delivered. The logo encompasses all the properties I asked for and I have enough assets to make the small tweaks that weren’t able to be made due to the deadline.
Would I use it again?
I’m torn. I got what I wanted, for a price that didn’t leave me worried about quality of the output and it was delivered on time, but I also participated in what felt like an economically abusive system.
I think if I were to use such a service in the future I’d prefer there to be the following options:
- Ability to opt-out of deadlines or to at least relax them — that way the listing can still be competitive but it gives me a means to tell the artist to fit working on my order in when they have time instead of forcing them to focus on it
- Clearer pricing breakdown — I want to know that the money I spend is going to the artist for their time and not being eaten up by fees they have to pay
