Don’t be confused: Fiverr’s Seller Plus Premium price increase isn’t a joke. The company is deadly serious about the price increase – and once again, the community is up in arms.
On April Fools Day, 2024, Fiverr sent an email out to the Seller Plus Premium community. A price increase is nothing unusual in today’s economy – but it sparked yet another outrage in the Fiverr community.
The premise of the outrage was simple: Fiverr had broken a promise to ~200 sellers taking their $3,800 monthly contribution to the coffers by inflating it to $7,800. But why does Fiverr need the extra $4,000 so much? And is the resulting loss of trust from 200 of Fiverr’s top sellers really worth it?
Beyond this exclusive group, sellers who had locked in a $29 rate were also told in no uncertain terms that they would also now have to pay $39 a month. The reason? Just a simple price realignment:
The “new” Seller Plus Premium offering is unchanged, although Request to Order is conspicuously missing. Does this mean that it may become available to all sellers? Or was it an oversight? And no, nothing appears to have been added to soften the blow. It’s just a price increase.
Once again, it seems, a tech company is showing its real cards with subscription models by changing the terms once the early subscribers have help to make the model a success.
Is this worth $19 or even $39 a month?
Possibly – but it depends where you are in your Fiverr career and what your needs are. And today, increasingly, it may just depend on whether you want to give Fiverr any more money than you absolutely need to.
Fiverr’s Broken Promise to Seller Plus Premium Sellers
In February 2021, Fiverr launched Seller Plus. A little while before that, it sent a small group of sellers an invitation to join the exclusive new program. These sellers were told that if they signed up as the first 200 sellers, they would enjoy a discounted rate.
I know, because I was one of them.
It was also made clear that this discount rate was locked in for as long as I remained a member. If I ever chose to cancel, I would be able to rejoin but only if I pay the full rate that other Seller Plus members pay. Fiverr describes this as “loyalty pricing”:
When Fiverr introduced Seller Plus Premium, I was automatically grandfathered into the program as one of the first 200.
The April Fool email represented a 100% price increase to my membership of Seller Plus Premium – and although I have written to my Success Manager to express disappointment, the silence has been deafening.
My response is simple: I’m closing my wallet.
Why I Won’t Renew My Fiverr Seller Plus Subscription
It is not just the broken promises that have annoyed me. It’s the simple lack of value that Seller Plus has to offer. Fiverr can of course choose to gatekeep features behind the program, but none of these features are essential to succeeding on Fiverr.
I am choosing not to renew my subscription of Seller Plus – and so are many other people. While having access to a Success Manager is useful and I will miss Request to Order, neither feature is worth almost $500 a year for me. The other features such as keyword analysis can be useful, but are largely crippled by their inadequacy and the ease of discoverability through alternative – and free – means.
It gets worse: I had a Success Manager before it even became a paid program. Back then, Success Managers were easy to contact, helpful, and didn’t rely on ChatGPT. They were provided to the platform’s top performers as a free service. In the three years since the introduction of the program and its gradual expansion, Success Manager quality has decreased as Fiverr’s take from sellers has soared north of 30%. The reasons for the expansion of the program are clear: they gift Fiverr with a steady source of mostly reliable monthly revenue.
Is Fiverr Seller Plus Premium Worth It Anymore?
But this expansion has come at a cost. Fiverr’s small team of Success Managers are spread out thinly. Worse, as new hires fill the ranks, they are often not as knowledgeable about Fiverr’s foibles as their sellers. It makes the Seller Plus Premium’s most useful program redundant – and leaves sellers wondering if paying $40 a month to give discount cards to their customers is worth it. After all, you can always offer a discount with a custom offer if you want to.
The webinars may be useful for newer sellers and freelancers, but less for the experienced. And while I am interested in AI and its use, I am dismayed by the platform’s current misguided focus on AI on the platform, an approach that is seeping into its webinars. Do you want to watch a webinar presented by Taryn Southern, an “AI storyteller” who is deeply entrenched in marketing for Blackrock Neuroscience, a company that installs medical brain implants in people? It’s interesting, yes – but for all the wrong reasons.
I am not the only seller who is turning Seller Plus on: whether you visit the Fiverr Forum or r/fiverr, the sentiment is very negative – and sellers are virtually unified in the opinion that it is Fiverr who is the April Fool with this price increase.
Despite all this, there will be many sellers who find Fiverr Seller Plus worth it, simply because one feature is locked behind it. Whatever that feature is, you need to be sure that it is worth the hundreds of dollars you’ll shell out for it.
I’m out. The feature I cared about has just gone from bad to worse and this is the final nail in my subscription coffin.
Fiverr Is Losing Buyers – And Hemorrhaging Sellers
Fiverr in 2024 has been a strange place, and the confusion and greed that seems to govern the company is filtering down to its userbase. Now, if you’re thinking of starting on Fiverr, I still recommend it. It’s still a place that can work incredibly well if you can get its algorithm on your side.
The rest is a mess that you will need to learn to tolerate. However, a quick look at what stock market analysts say is concerning. When Fiverr introduced its new levels and rating system on Valentine’s Day, its stock went into freefall.
The Globe and Mail reported that Fiverr spent $161 million on sales and marketing in 2023 (54% of its gross profit), but still lost 200,000 buyers. They also write that while Fiverr is monetizing its freelancers with services like Seller Plus, sales are flat, buyers are leaving, and sellers might just decide not to pay for the frills of Seller Plus.
The Globe and Mail is clear: revenue growth is coming from freelancers who sell on the platform. Yet 2024’s theme has been one of alienating its freelance base. But why are those buyers leaving?
If sellers stop subscribing Seller Plus and Seller Plus Premium, Fiverr will be forced to evaluate what it is doing. But that, unfortunately, requires unified action, which is unlikely to happen.
AI and Scams Run Rampant on Fiverr
Since Fiverr encourages its sellers to use ChatGPT for communication and has a non-disclosure policy in place for AI, there are many opportunists charging hundreds of dollars for, well, basic AI stuff that you or I could do in a few minutes. While refunds are being issued for this, the loss of consumer trust is far more costly.
Fiverr is desperately trying to push upmarket – as I’ve noted in my own quarterly reports – but anyone following buyer complaints on online communities will notice a theme: it’s no longer, “it was only $5 – you get what you pay for” but, “I paid $300 for trash,” a growing trend in buyer complaints on r/Fiverr. The example below is just one out of many:
Want more? Here’s a Fiverr seller who sometimes purchases services talking about a recent experience on a post about potential reasons for the drop behind Fiverr’s stock market performance:
It’s not hard to see why buyers might be decreasing, even if Fiverr claims this is a result of targeting a more “upmarket” audience rather than the mass market of yesteryear. If Fiverr can’t police its marketplace of overpriced AI hucksters, then buyers will leave. Sellers recognize this; Fiverr, apparently, does not.
Fiverr is using AI and automation to govern a marketplace and not being entirely honest about the state of its vetted freelance marketplaces. Combine this with Fiverr’s honest sellers being horrified at the direction the company is taking – a lack of transparency, broken promises, and all. It is a toxic recipe for the future of Fiverr, a company that stresses its listening ability, transparency, and championing of freelancer health.
Something needs to be fixed: but the company continues to push forward and ignore the criticisms of the people that made Fiverr, launching new disappointments on incongruous days of the year. It all seems like a bad joke, but it isn’t.
Fiverr’s New Seller Plus Premium Pricing Reflects Fiverr’s Greed
If Fiverr doesn’t honor its own offer, then I’m simply not paying. I paid my $19 a month when I was sick and hospitalized. I made no income, but I felt it was worth paying just to retain the discount. It’s disappointing on a very personal level for me. I’m barely a year into my recovery, and I feel like I wasted money that I could have otherwise used to make my life more comfortable when my body was destroying itself.
That’s a lot of trust and goodwill, gone up in a puff of smoke.
It’s hard to understand what Fiverr is doing at the moment. I can only conclude that the company is struggling and is now trying to extract as much money as it can while minimizing the actual quality of any services delivered – this is evident from the overreliance on AI and automation everywhere on the platform.
I’ll still keep my gigs up and work with clients – but like so many other sellers and buyers, Fiverr has broken my trust. It will be a long time before they win it back, if ever.
If Fiverr wants to go upmarket, it must do better before its best sellers abandon the platform completely, leaving its upmarket clients in the hands of sellers who mirror Fiverr’s own approach to business: overpriced services with little value and poor, AI-driven service interactions.
It’s concerning.
But in the meantime, I won’t be contributing any more than the basic 20% commission rate – and many other sellers who were not lucky enough to get the $19 offer will be rejecting Seller Plus, too. Fiverr may not listen to its userbase, but it may listen to a drop in revenue.
