Understanding Connects
Connects are Upwork's virtual currency for submitting proposals. You spend them every time you apply to a job. This is intentional — it filters out spam applications and forces freelancers to think before applying. If you treat Connects as disposable, you'll burn through them fast and wonder why your account balance is empty with nothing to show for it.
How Connects work
- Each Connect costs $0.15 USD and is purchased in bundles.
- Applying to a job costs 1–8 Connects depending on the job. Low-budget or simple jobs cost fewer; competitive or enterprise jobs cost more.
- Upwork's Basic plan (free) includes 10 Connects per month — enough for 1–5 applications depending on the job.
- The Freelancer Plus plan ($19.99/month) includes 100 Connects monthly, carries over unused Connects, and shows you the approximate number of proposals a job has already received — a significant advantage.
The real cost of a proposal
Most freelancers calculate their Connects budget by the number alone. But there's a hidden cost: time. A tailored proposal for a relevant job takes 15–30 minutes. A generic one takes less, but doesn't work. When you apply to a job you can't win — wrong rate range, wrong skill match, wrong budget — you lose both the Connects and the time.
Think of each application as costing $0.75–$1.20 in Connects plus 20 minutes of your time. That reframes the question from "can I afford to apply?" to "is this job worth applying to?"
How to spend Connects strategically
Check before you apply
Before spending Connects on any job, scan for these signals:
- Payment verified — the client has a verified payment method. Non-verified clients can't actually pay you.
- Client history — how many jobs have they posted? How many hires? A client with 20 posts and 1 hire is a warning sign.
- Review score — clients also receive scores from freelancers. Below 4.5 usually means difficult to work with.
- Budget vs your rate — if their budget is $50 and your minimum is $500, applying wastes everyone's time.
- Number of proposals — visible on Freelancer Plus. A job with 50+ proposals already is a much harder win than one with 5–10.
Apply early
Clients review proposals in batches. The first 5–10 proposals a job receives get read most carefully; by proposal 30, many clients have already shortlisted someone. Applying within the first hour of a job posting is a structural advantage — not because your proposal is better, but because it gets seen at all.
Quality over quantity
Sending 20 generic proposals is worse than sending 5 tailored ones. A 20% reply rate on 5 targeted proposals (1 reply) beats a 3% rate on 20 generic ones (0–1 replies) — and costs fewer Connects. Track your reply rate. If it's under 10%, the problem is proposal quality, not volume.
Boosted proposals
Upwork lets you spend additional Connects to "boost" a proposal — pushing it higher in the client's list. The cost is set by a bidding system: you see the current going rate and decide whether to match it. Boosting is not a substitute for a good proposal — a boosted mediocre proposal still gets ignored. It's useful when you're confident in the proposal and the job is highly competitive. See Boosted Proposals for a full breakdown of when it's worth it.
Connects vs Freelancer Plus
Whether to pay for Freelancer Plus ($19.99/month) comes down to two things: volume and competition intel. If you're applying to more than 10 jobs per month and want to see proposal counts before committing, it pays for itself quickly. If you're in a very low-competition niche and don't apply often, the free plan is sufficient.