When you need expert advice or help planning a project’s scope, a consultation with a professional is a great place to start.
Finding a consultant
If a freelancer you’re working with offers consultations, you’ll see it on their profile. You’ll see the topics of expertise they can discuss and how much they charge per 30 minutes.
You can find other freelancers who offer consultations by following these steps:
- Enter the area of expertise you need in the search bar
- In the Talent type section, select Offers consultations
- You’ll see freelancers who offer consultations, and you can open a listing to learn more about what a specific freelancer offers
Choosing a consultation
For each consultation project, you’ll be able to see details about what the consulting freelancer offers and the price per 30 minutes. You’ll also see what documents they provide after the consultation. These may include a project plan, time and cost estimate, meeting summary, or a combination of those.
Booking a consultation
Once you’ve found someone you want to meet with, here’s how to book:
- Create an account if you don’t already have one
- Schedule a consultation from available times on the consultant’s calendar
- Proceed to checkout
- Enter a payment method or choose your existing payment method
- Confirm and fund the consultation and pay the contract initiation fee
- Send the consultant’s required information within 24 hours
You’ll see what information the consultant needs from you to complete the consultation when you’re booking. This may include your website, explaining your business, explaining what you need from the consultation, or other information that the consultant needs to prepare to help you.
You’ll have to submit that information for the consultation to move forward after purchase, so you’ll want to be sure that you can provide what the consultant requires. (If you’re unable to submit the requirements within 24 hours after purchase, we’ll automatically cancel the project.)
After you book
Once you submit the freelancer’s requirements, they’ll review them. If they find they aren’t able to help you with what you need, they’ll cancel and you’ll get your money back.
You’ll get a new virtual work space called a workroom — a page we create specifically for your consultation. It will track whether you’ve submitted the requirements, show the time and date of the meeting, and show the follow up after the meeting.
You can message your consultant from the workroom. You can also view past messages and documents that you and your consultant have submitted here.
You can reschedule your consultation in the workroom too. Choose a new date and time from your freelancer’s calendar that falls after their minimum booking notice, and we’ll send them a message that you rescheduled.
You can cancel your consultation up to 24 hours before the meeting and we’ll refund your money. However, if you cancel within 24 hours of the meeting or don’t show up to the meeting, we won’t refund the money and we’ll send your payment to the consultant.
After the consultation
After your meeting, the consultant will send you the documents they offered in their consultation description. We’ll let you know when the freelancer completes that step. From there, you can review the documents and approve payment to the consultant.
If you and the freelancer agree that you don’t need any follow-up documents after the meeting, you’ll have the option to go ahead and approve and pay. However, if you opt out of receiving these documents, you’ll also be asked at that time to agree not to file a dispute of payment on the consultation. Without documents, we wouldn’t have any way to review and settle a dispute.
What’s next?
After a consultation, you may have a clearer understanding of your project’s scope and whether the consulting freelancer has the skills and availability you need. Following up after the consultation can help you move your project forward.
Following up with your consulting freelancer
If you’re interested in working with your consulting freelancer, you can post a job and invite them to submit a proposal.
You can also ask your freelancer to create and propose the contract for you. Then you’ll just need to review and accept the contract to begin working together.
You can provide feedback to the freelancer by choosing Leave Feedback in the Order Details section of your consultation’s contract workroom. Feedback can help freelancers understand what’s working well and what they need to improve, and it can give other clients insight into the freelancer’s abilities.
Moving forward with a different freelancer
If you’re ready to move forward with your project but need to work with someone else, you can create a job post or browse projects on Project Catalog™.
Creating a job post lets you design the details of the job and explain exactly what you need. We’ll post the job on Upwork’s marketplace, and interested freelancers can submit their proposals to you for your review.
Browsing projects may help you find freelancers who offer a customizable project similar to yours on Project Catalog. You can choose one of their existing projects and customize it to fit your needs or ask a freelancer on Project Catalog to create a contract proposal instead.
Pro Tip:
If you liked working with the consulting freelancer but they don’t have the availability you need, you may consider asking them to refer you to another freelancer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Once you’ve found someone you want to meet with, here’s how to book:
- Create an account if you don’t already have one
- Schedule a consultation from available times on the consultant’s calendar
- Proceed to checkout
- Enter a payment method or choose your existing payment method
- Confirm and fund the consultation and contract initiation fee
- Send the consultant’s required information within 24 hours
We’ll cancel your project if you don’t share mandatory requirements with your consultant within 24 hours. Your consultant uses this information to learn what you want to talk about. Without it, they may not have time to prepare or the right background information to know how they can help you.
Once you file a dispute, our dispute team will review what happened through our current dispute and refund process. They will take into consideration that the no-show was the reason for a refund request.
You can request a refund from the consultant. If they reject your request, you can file a dispute. However, the consultant will also have the opportunity to show what they provided. Since value is subjective, we encourage you to work this out with the consultant and provide feedback about your experience.
Please wait at least 5 minutes. If the consultant is more than 5 minutes late, you can consider them a no-show and request a full refund, either by asking the consultant or filing a dispute.
If you’re more than 5 minutes late, the consultant can consider you a no-show. They’ll still get paid even though you didn’t attend the meeting.
Please see this support article for guidelines.
No, when you choose to approve and pay without receiving documents, you’re also agreeing that you won’t file a dispute on the consultation payment. Without documents, we wouldn’t have a way to review and settle the dispute.
You can post a job and invite them to submit a proposal, or you can ask your freelancer to create and propose the contract for you. Then you’ll just need to review and accept the contract to begin working together.
You can post a job on the marketplace and let freelancers submit contract proposals to you for your review. You may consider asking the consulting freelancer if they can refer another freelancer from Upwork for your job post.
You can also browse Project Catalog for a freelancer who has a project similar to yours and either customize the project to fit your needs or ask them to create a contract proposal for you.