Freelance Gigs Scraper with Competition Score

Freelance Gigs Scraper - Find Low-Competition Jobs on Freelancer.com & Upwork

Stop wasting hours scrolling through overcrowded job boards. This scraper extracts active freelance job listings from Freelancer.com and Upwork, then scores every single gig on a 1-10 competition scale so you know exactly which jobs are worth your time.

The Competition Score - How It Works

Every scraped gig gets a smart score from 1 (easy win) to 10 (nearly impossible) based on:

• Proposal count - fewer proposals = less competition
• Budget size - higher budgets often mean more serious clients
• Client quality signals - verified payment, hire rate, review history
• Bid range analysis - wide bid ranges suggest unclear requirements (your chance to stand out)

What You Get Per Gig

Field	Description
Job Title	The exact listing title
Description	Full job description text
Budget (USD)	Fixed price or hourly rate range
Skills Required	Listed skills and technologies
Proposal Count	How many freelancers already applied
Average Bid	Mean bid amount from existing proposals
Client Rating	Employer's average review score
Client Hire Rate	Percentage of jobs where the client hired someone
Payment Verified	Whether the client has verified payment method
Competition Score	1-10 score - lower is better
Platform	freelancer.com or upwork.com
URL	Direct link to apply

Why This Beats Manual Searching

• Instant prioritization - sort by Competition Score and apply to the best gigs first
• Hidden gems - find jobs with low proposals that are buried on page 3+
• Cross-platform - compare Freelancer.com and Upwork side by side
• Smart filtering - skip jobs with too many proposals or budgets below your minimum
• Structured data - JSON output ready for your pipeline, spreadsheet or notification system

Perfect For

• Freelancers - find low-competition, high-value gigs faster than anyone else
• Freelance agencies - monitor new job postings across platforms automatically
• Lead generation - build lists of businesses posting freelance jobs
• Market research - analyze freelance market trends, average budgets and competition levels
• Job alert systems - set up automated notifications for your niche keywords
• Rate benchmarking - understand what clients pay for specific skills

Platform Support

Platform	Free Plan	Proxy Required	Notes
Freelancer.com	Yes	No	Uses CheerioCrawler - fast and lightweight
Upwork	No	Yes (Residential)	Requires paid plan + residential proxies for Cloudflare bypass

How to Use

1. Select your platforms (freelancer, upwork, or both)
2. Enter search keywords (e.g., "python scraping", "react developer", "logo design")
3. Set your filters: max proposals, minimum budget, max pages
4. Run and get scored results sorted from easiest to hardest

Example Output

{
  "title": "Build a Python web scraper for e-commerce prices",
  "description": "Need a scraper that extracts product prices from 5 competitor websites...",
  "platform": "freelancer",
  "budgetMin": 250,
  "budgetMax": 750,
  "currency": "USD",
  "proposalCount": 8,
  "averageBid": 450,
  "clientRating": 4.8,
  "clientHireRate": 0.85,
  "paymentVerified": true,
  "skills": ["python", "web-scraping", "data-extraction"],
  "competitionScore": 3,
  "url": "https://www.freelancer.com/projects/..."
}

Technical Details

• Crawler engine: CheerioCrawler for Freelancer.com (no browser needed), Playwright for Upwork
• Validation: AJV schema validation on all inputs
• Free plan compatible: Freelancer.com works without proxies on Apify FREE plan
• Output format: Structured JSON via Apify Dataset
• Error handling: Failed URLs logged to KeyValueStore under "FAILED_URLS"