5 of the Best Ways to Get Paid as a Freelancer
You can have the best offer in the world, but without a good way to take payment, it doesn’t matter. After years of using different processors. Doing hundreds of thousands personally through them all, I’ve put together a list.
Use this list as a starting point so that you can take your money without paying tons of fees.
The best ways to accept payments for freelancers are…
Table of Contents
1) Stripe
2) Wise
3) PayPal
4) Crypto
5) Gumroad
1) Stripe is the easiest as you can send them a payment link.
Depending on your country you may not be able to use this. However, Stripe is an easy way to manage your business and accept payments.
2) Wise (used to be called Transferwise) is a great way to pay staff and accept payments from clients.
The “issue” with Wise is it can be confusing for clients to set up. The reason I like this method though is the fees are lower than PayPal and the ease of sending out payments.
You can get started with a personal and business account here.
3) PayPal is easy and most people have an account.
My biggest issue with PayPal however are the fee’s and they’ll randomly lock up your account. I’ve only personally had $8k locked up for 24 hours one time. So all in all my experience has been good. Students and allies have had much larger amounts of money locked up for months. While you will probably never experience this, I try to avoid using PayPal as much as possible.
4) Crypto is another easy way to accept payments.
BTC/ETH/ChainLink/USDT are the ones that I use. It’s a good way to build up coins and increase your income. Obviously, the thing you want to pay attention to is the current price of your specific coins. One day you may have your $2k client payment there, then you don’t watch it for a few days and only have $1,800.
5) Gumroad is the LAST resort.
Gumroad is best for creators who are selling courses and digital books. Not for freelancers offering services. I’ve only recommended Gumroad to students who live in India. The fees can be high, but it’s also an easy way to accept payments.
As a freelancer, your goal is to make it easy to accept money while keeping your fees low. Now you can with the options you’ve got above.
As always this is a list of what works for me, so you’re welcome to try different things.
With that said, I highly recommend you set up a Wise account. It has come in handy for me to use as a personal bank account + business account while traveling abroad.
You can set up an account here (some countries can even get debit cards).
Always the best,
Dylan Madden
