All startups need money, and when finding it is not easy, you will pick up any job as long as it gets something in the bank. This is when sites like rentacoder.com come into picture, and are quite useful as well.
However, don’t pin your hopes on it just yet. Doing business via the site (and most other sites too) is not really a very intelligent way to do business. You can only make about $7-$15 per hour working here. Even though the regular rate for a direct project would be around $15-$25 per hour per developer. But the point I would like to emphasize is the fees you need to pay.
RentACoder charges a fee of 15% of bid amount. So if you bid $1000, RAC gets $150 off it right away, and you get to take the $850. After that, you can ask them to send a check ($35-$55) or ask them to transfer to paypal.
If you ask for a wire transfer, you end up paying only about $35-$55 but will take upto a month to get the money in your account. However, if you ask them to send the money to paypal, things can be faster, but of course you lose more money in the process.
RAC does not charge anything for the tranfer but Paypal charges a cool 3.99% of the transaction amount. So if you go ahead with this option, you get $816.085 in your paypal account, which looks more like $816.08.
Now if you transfer that money to your bank account, Paypal converts the money at a conversion rate of Rs 38.0541 (Today’s rate), and sends Rs 31,055.27 to your bank account (Starting November 2007 this is free, and takes place in a week.)
The Yahoo Finance site gives the conversion rate as Rs 39.325 for a dollar. According to this, for the $1000 you should have got around Rs 39325.
Therefore you suddenly realize that you have lost about 21.03% of the amount already. Of course, you need to pay a service tax of 12.36% on this money, and income tax on this amount would go upto 30%. If applied recursively, you would lose about 48.45% of the amount.
So on the whole, if you want to get some work done, I would suggest you head over to RentACoder and find a coder there. (You can ask me to do it here, my RAC resume lies here)
But if you are a coder, you might look elsewhere for the money.
This is not to say that I have not enjoyed working on the site. There are some really cool projects I am doing there and some other I would like to get my hands on. Also, if you have read elsewhere about the buyers choosing the lowest bidders and people doing it for less than a dollar an hour, believe me it’s utter crap. In hardly any of the projects that I have bid on, has the project gone to the lowest bidder. It’s usually close to the middle in the band. And in cases where it does go to the lowest bidder, you see a repost in a week 
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December 14th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
cool man, never knew this kind of thing existed, and even when i did, after a month of the post…..am i going insane!
more once i visit the site…
December 14th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
But sometimes it’s still worth the 48%
April 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I just saw a bid request for 2 months of work go for $250! That’s $0.66 per hour if you work 40-hour weeks (after RAC’s huge fee). Are you gonna repeat your claim that people aren’t coding for under $1 per hour?
Here it is:
http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/misc/BidRequests/ShowBidRequest.asp?lngBidRequestId=913845
2 months at $25/hour would be $8000. I wonder if anybody even bid half that high.
The same buyer had only one other bid that was publicly viewable in his history: A request to clone a website. It went for $100, and it DIDN’T get reposted. It would have to be done in half a day to be worth $25/hour.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
You really got me there
Anyways, did you try and analyze if the project was really worth 2 months of time because you know clients usually just say that yes, yes the project would take a max of two months.
About the website clone, writing a curl statement to fetch the complete website takes about 10 minutes. You can spend the next 3 hours 50 minutes redecorating it.
September 12th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
From my personal experience RAC is a very risky place to work in. I bid an extremely low price for a big project hoping to get a good rating and more subsequent projects. However, the way that it turned out was that the buyer kept on expanding the scope of the project and it would never end. Frustrated I put the project into arbitration, but lost because of some feature that I tried to do but was not able to do completely. Overall, I lost about a months effort to nothing and most probably the buyer got a lot more than the initial project work for free.
On RAC, you need to be very careful about clueless buyers who will make completing projects a pain.
I would advise coders to stick with an hourly payment cycle on something like odesk.com and stay away from RAC.