Three labour markets.
One roster.
A bench engineer still on their employer's payroll, an independent freelancer and an agency specialist, working on the same project, in the same dashboard, against the same billing ledger — with the split shown to everyone in it.
Compliance, transparent billing and verified delivery are the product, not the onboarding call.
- Commission
- 5% flat, waivable
- Every worker
- Supply source labelled
- Every delivery
- Hashed and sealed
- Billableon a client project
- Internalon the firm's own work
- Benchidle. paid for. unbilled.
- Leaveaway
Four states, and only three of them have a market. Prolancing is the market for the third — without asking anyone to resign, and without asking HR to sign off on a spreadsheet.
Four ledgers that never meet.
Idle capacity on one side, unmet demand on the other, and a compliance gap between them wide enough that everyone has agreed to pretend it is not there.
- Enterprise
The bench is a cost centre with no counterparty.
An IT services firm carries skilled engineers between projects. Payroll runs every month regardless. There is no compliant, contractual way to let another company rent that capacity for eleven weeks, so nobody does.
Salaries paid, nothing billed - Freelancer
The fee is charged twice, and the proof does not travel.
Upwork takes 10% from the freelancer and up to 7.99% from the client, plus a contract initiation fee of up to $14.99 that is not refunded even when the client wins the dispute. Fiverr takes a flat 20% from the seller and charges the buyer on top. Both blended rates are still rising. Meanwhile the strongest evidence of competence — work a client approved and paid for — stays inside the platform it happened on.
19.8–28.0% blended take - Client
Three kinds of worker, three unrelated systems.
Freelancers in a marketplace, agency contractors on a staff-aug MSA, employees in the HRIS. Nobody can see one project team, one cost, one delivery record — so procurement defends the spend with a spreadsheet built by hand.
No single view of the team - HR & Legal
Redeployment dies in review, not in negotiation.
Who owns the IP the engineer produces? Is the receiving client a competitor? Does this breach the moonlighting policy? Every existing tool treats these as the customer's problem. They are the actual reason the bench stays idle.
The blocker nobody models
Fee structures as each platform publishes them; blended take rates as each company reports them, checked August 2026.
One project. Three employers.
A bench engineer on a partner company's payroll, two independents paid from escrow, and the client's own programme lead — in one roster, with one delivery record.
Every marketplace can show you a list of freelancers. None of them can show you this row, because none of them have a contract that lets a salaried employee bill an outside client without leaving their job.
The chip is never optional and never collapsible. A client who cannot see who employs the person they are paying is not a client, they are a mark.
“Payments from agencies to agency members are not protected or facilitated by Upwork… Agency members may be classified as either freelancers or employees of their agency.”
Upwork help centre
Fiverr's flagship compliance product exists to flag when “the freelancer could be classified as an employee, posing legal implications.”
Fiverr worker-classification audit
Employees are permitted on those platforms and invisible to them: no employment-type attribute, no cost rate against bill rate, no margin model. One of them treats a salaried person on a project as a risk to warn you about. We treat it as the row.
- R. IyerBackend engineerBNBench· Meridian Systems60%₹1,80,000Employer payroll
Still salaried at Meridian. Seconded, not resigned.
- M. SequeiraMotion designerFLFreelancer45%₹1,10,000Escrow, on milestone
- A. NandiProduct strategistFLFreelancer25%₹65,000Escrow, on milestone
- P. RaghavanProgramme leadCLClient100%—Not billed
Sample roster. People, companies and amounts are illustrative — no customer is represented on this page.
Everyone in the room sees the same table.
Staffing margin has always hidden inside a blended rate: the client is quoted one number and never learns what reached the person doing the work. We show the split to the client, the employer and the employee, on the same screen.
The field is moving the other way. Fiverr's newest pricing surface rolls fees into the displayed price, so the buyer and the seller are shown different numbers with the spread invisible to both. That is margin transparency going backwards, and it is the easiest thing on this page to be right about.
This is not generosity. It is the only way a procurement team can defend the spend, and the only way an engineer believes the stipend is real.
R. Iyer — seconded from Meridian Systems
| Recipient | Share | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Meridian SystemsThe engineer's employer, for the seconded capacity | 85% | ₹1,53,000 |
| R. IyerStipend share, on top of the salary already being paidThe recognition line. Most platforms do not have one. | 10% | ₹18,000 |
| ProlancingFlat commission. No blended rate, no spread on the engineer. | 5% | ₹9,000 |
| Statutory withholdingTDS deducted before remittance, at the rate applicable to the engagement | at payout | — |
Illustrative split. Shares are agreed per engagement between the client, the supplying employer and the employee. TDS is withheld at the rate applicable to the engagement and is computed at payout, not here.
Proof you own, not proof you rent.
Auto-generated portfolios already exist. Fiverr builds one from real deliveries — and caps it at seventeen files, deletes the older ones, and lets the client revoke the whole thing permanently, at any time, with no undo. Upwork asks the client to approve a portfolio item and then throws the approval away.
So the gap is not verification. It is permanence and portability: a client-approved record of work that stays yours, and still means something on a page we do not control.
Permanent once sealed
A client approves the deliverable, and that approval is the record. It cannot be withdrawn later, and nothing is silently deleted to make room.
Uncapped, and it takes real work
Zipped folders, source files, cloud links — the things professional delivery actually consists of, rather than only what previews nicely in a feed.
Yours to take with you
Exportable as a certificate carrying the same fingerprint, so the proof still works on a page that has nothing to do with us.
Never mixed with self-reported work
Verified items sit in their own tab with the seal on them. A viewer can always tell which claims a client stood behind and which you wrote yourself.
Drawn as a stamp, not a blue tick. Elsewhere a badge costs $99 and verifies the person rather than the work — which is a different claim wearing the same jacket.
Payments onboarding — motion system
Delivered in Nova — payments rebuild · approved 14 May 2026 · 41 source files
- Approved by
- Nova Financial Services
- Delivered by
- M. Sequeira · Freelancer
- Fingerprint
- B41E7C9A · sha-256, first 8
“This is to certify that M. Sequeira was engaged on the Nova payments rebuild between February and May 2026, and that the deliverables listed overleaf were accepted by the client. Each carries the delivery fingerprint under which it was approved.”
Sample record. The fingerprint is SHA-256 of the project, deliverable and approval timestamp, shown as its first eight characters. It is a trust signal you can check, not cryptographic security.
The part that actually blocks the deal.
Nobody keeps engineers on the bench because they enjoy it. They keep them there because legal cannot answer four questions fast enough to matter. Those four questions are the product.
Three states, marked honestly. Concierge means a person from Prolancing does it with you, because the API to do it properly does not exist yet.
Secondment agreement
Generated per engagement between the supplying employer, the client and the platform. The employee never leaves their payroll.
AutomatedIP assignment
Bound to the deliverable and its delivery fingerprint, so ownership is attached to the artefact rather than to a paragraph in an MSA.
AutomatedConflict-of-interest screen
The receiving client is checked against the supplying employer's restricted list before the engagement can open.
AutomatedMoonlighting policy attestation
The employer configures the policy; the employee attests against it at engagement. This is the clause that usually kills redeployment.
AutomatedKYC — PAN, Aadhaar, bank
Documents are uploaded and verified in review. Bank details are stored encrypted and are never returned to the interface after save.
GuidedGST details for client entities
Collected at onboarding and carried onto every invoice raised against the entity.
GuidedFTE conversion offer letter
Drafted with the Indian statutory clauses a candidate expects — probation, notice, gratuity eligibility, leave, confidentiality — for counsel to review.
AutomatedPF and ESI enrolment
Handled with you, by us, at conversion. There is no enrolment API and we do not pretend otherwise.
ConciergeTDS treatment
Determined per engagement with your finance team. Withholding is applied at payout; the platform does not compute a rate for you.
Concierge
Generated instruments are drafts for your counsel to review. Prolancing does not provide legal advice.
Marked from what they publish.
Several of these are very good products. Deel does worker compliance better than anyone. Fiverr's Live Portfolio is the closest thing to verified delivery that exists. Where a competitor earns a mark here, it gets one.
What none of them have is an object model where a company is a buyer and a seller of labour at the same time — which is the row every other row on this page hangs off.
| Capability | Upwork& Lifted | FiverrBusiness | ToptalVetted network | BraintrustMarkup model | DeelEOR & contractors | OnBenchMarkBench sharing | ProlancingThis platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A company's idle salaried staff can be billed to an outside clientFiverr bought a ~200-person engineering bench in 2026 — a staffing move for their own supply, not a market for anyone else's. | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Bench, freelance and agency talent transactable in one project teamUpwork permits agency employees but cannot see them — payments between an agency and its members are, in Upwork's own words, not protected or facilitated by Upwork. Fiverr caps agencies at nine and calls them profile cards, not transactable entities. | Partial | No | No | No | Partial | Unverified | Yes |
| Every worker's supply source and employment type shown to the clientDeel distinguishes EOR employee from contractor. Upwork has no employment-type attribute at all, and advises large agencies to bill the whole team under one identity. | No | No | No | No | Partial | Unverified | Yes |
| The client can see how their money is splitBraintrust publishes its markup and Deel breaks down employer cost on EOR. Fiverr's newest pricing surface moves the other way: buyer and seller are shown different numbers with the spread invisible to both. | No | No | No | Partial | Partial | Unverified | Yes |
| The worker earns a share of external billing while staying salariedThis line can only apply to a platform where one company is both buyer and seller of labour, which is the boundary the row is really marking. | No | No | No | No | No | Unverified | Yes |
| Secondment, IP assignment, conflict-of-interest and moonlighting modelled in-productDeel is genuinely excellent here. But everyone treats worker classification as a risk to flag — Fiverr's compliance product exists to warn that a freelancer could be classified as an employee — rather than as a structure to model. | Partial | Partial | Partial | Unverified | Yes | Unverified | Yes |
| A verified work record the freelancer keeps: permanent, uncapped, exportableFiverr's Live Portfolio genuinely auto-populates from delivery, but caps at 17 rolling files and the client can revoke it permanently at any time. Upwork gates publication on client approval and then discards the attestation. | Partial | Partial | No | Unverified | No | Unverified | Yes |
| Published, fixed, symmetric fee schedulePublished is not the same as fixed. Upwork's client side is "up to 7.99%" plus a contract initiation fee that varies from $0.99 to $14.99 and is not refunded even when the client wins a dispute. | Partial | Partial | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| White-label or embedded deploymentUpwork's enterprise arm was spun out as Lifted in August 2025 and does have real white-label — though no enterprise customer had migrated onto it as of Q1 2026. | Partial | No | No | Unverified | Unverified | Unverified | Partial |
Assessed August 2026 against each vendor's own help centre, terms pages and investor disclosures rather than third-party summaries, which contradicted the vendors' own documentation in every case we checked. Cells we could not settle from public material read “unverified” rather than a guess. If a mark here is wrong, write to contact@prolancing.app and we will correct it and say that we did.
Three doors into the same ledger.
Monetise the bench without losing the engineer.
Publish available capacity, screen the receiving client against your restricted list, and bill their time under a secondment agreement. Nobody resigns. Nobody moonlights. Your utilisation number moves.
- Employee stays on your payroll
- Conflict and moonlighting screens before engagement
- Your engineer earns a stipend share
Keep more of the fee, and keep the proof.
5% flat instead of the 10–20% the large marketplaces charge, waived entirely on a subscription. Every deliverable a client approves is sealed into a verified portfolio record you can show anywhere.
- 5% flat, waivable
- Delivery sealed with a checkable fingerprint
- Experience letters generated from real records
Assemble the team you actually need.
A bench specialist for the eleven weeks you need one, an independent for the design system, your own lead running the programme — in one roster, one delivery record, one invoice you can take to finance.
- Every worker's supply source labelled
- Milestones held in escrow
- One delivery record for the whole team
5% flat, one side, and you can turn it off.
The two largest freelance marketplaces now take 19.8% and 28.0% of what changes hands, and both are still rising. They get there by charging both sides, and by pricing the second side in language like “up to”.
A marketplace that hides its take has to keep the parties apart. We would rather charge less and let them see each other.
| Platform | From the worker | From the client | Blended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fiverr | 20% flat, no tiering | $3.50 under $200, plus service fee | 28.0% |
| Upwork | 10% | Up to 7.99%, plus $0.99–14.99 per contract | 19.8% |
| Braintrust | 0% | 15% markup | 15% |
| Toptal | Not published | Not published | —Not published |
| OnBenchMark | 0% | ₹15–40K per month | 0%Subscription only |
| Prolancing | 5% flat | None | 5% |
| Prolancing, on subscription | 0% | None | 0% |
Fee structures as each platform publishes them, and blended take rates as each company reports them, checked August 2026. Third-party summaries of these numbers were wrong in every case we checked against the vendor's own documentation, so none are used here. Toptal does not publish its margin.
5% flat commission on billed work
Freelancers and clients starting out
- No listing fees
- No fee on the client side
- Escrow on every milestone
per person, per month · commission waived
Anyone billing enough that 5% costs more than the seat
- 0% commission on billed work
- Hybrid project workspace
- Priority matching
per supply agreement
IT services firms placing bench capacity
- Secondment and compliance engine
- Employee stipend share configured by you
- Utilisation reporting across engagements
Idle capacity is not a spreadsheet problem.
It is an engineer with eight years of experience being paid to wait, and a designer losing a fifth of her fee to a platform that will not vouch for her work. The same infrastructure fixes both: a contract that lets capacity move, a ledger that shows the split, and a record that proves the work happened.
We are building it India-first, because this is where the bench is.