If you take on contract work, you publish what you offer and clients come to you. This is the contractor side of Employee and contractor.
Listings are free today
Publishing a service listing costs nothing, and appearing in the directory costs nothing.
"Today" is doing real work in that sentence. Paid promotion — a time-boxed featured window for a listing — is planned, and when it ships some listings will be promoted and will say so. What is true now is that there is no charge to publish and no charge to be found; we would rather tell you that plainly than imply a permanent guarantee we intend to change.
Categories
Every listing sits in a category. The category is what makes you findable by someone who knows what they need but not who does it.
Pick the one a client would look under, not the one that describes your job title most precisely. Somebody looking for a new website searches for web development, not for the framework you prefer.
Enquiries
A client contacts you through an enquiry, which lands in your list and notifies you. Enquiries have their own set of statuses — not the same ones applications use:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | Sent, and you have not opened it yet. |
| Viewed | You have opened it. |
| Accepted | You have agreed to take the work on. |
| Declined | You are not taking it. |
| Withdrawn | The sender pulled it. |
Accepted is deliberately not the end. Agreeing to do the work is the start of the conversation, so the thread stays open afterwards. Only a decline or a withdrawal closes it.
You can set viewed, accepted or declined. The sender can withdraw.
Two limits worth knowing
Ten enquiries per sender per day, shared across service enquiries and enquiries to companies. It is an anti-spam measure, not a business limit: it stops one account messaging every provider in a category, which is what makes a directory useless. A real client will not reach it.
One enquiry per listing per sender, ever. A second attempt at the same listing does not create a second thread — it keeps the conversation in one place instead of starting a new one beside it.
Being listed at all
Like every profile, a new one is unlisted by default. Publishing a service listing does not change that; the two are separate switches, deliberately, so writing a draft never publishes you by accident.