Upwork saves $1 million on manual reviews

Background

Upwork is the world's work marketplace, where businesses can connect with freelance talent from around the globe. Upwork makes it easy for freelancers and talent to connect and find jobs wherever they are. It’s important that freelancers only see professional, safe, and inviting job posts. The platform must operate in compliance with payment partners’ policies and regulatory requirements in the US, EU, and dozens of other jurisdictions.

Challenge

Keeping marketplaces like Upwork safe is a constant battle. Here’s where Upwork stood before SafetyKit:

1. Updating a policy required substantial engineering resources to handle model retraining, accuracy testing, and production deployment.
2. Relying on manual review meant Upwork could only moderate ~20% of job postings.
3. Human reviewers had low accuracy — 80% on average.
4. Existing ML models and legacy vendors could only handle a subset of risk areas and could only apply simple and rigid policies.

Solution

Upwork now sends 100% of Upwork posts to SafetyKit for review against 100% of their custom, platform-specific policies.

The Upwork policies and ops teams use SafetyKit’s dashboard to monitor performance and guarantee quality.

Upwork sees better-than-human accuracy, and is moving to full automation with SafetyKit.

Results

$1M/year savings with >95% accuracy

If we were to enforce our policies on all jobs posted on Upwork manually, it would cost us upwards of 2 million dollars. SafetyKit allows us to do that at less than half the cost while still maintaining an accuracy rate of 95% or more.

Cameron Dodge
^{Director of Trust & Safety Operations}

Easy integration with minimal engineering commitment

SafetyKit's team and their technology made it really easy to get going. In just two weeks, we were sending 100% of our public job postings to SafetyKit

Cameron Dodge
^{Director of Trust & Safety Operations}

More violations caught = Less business risk

Context-aware LLMs identify significantly more policy violations than legacy keyword systems, directly resulting in less regulatory, legal, and reputational risk exposure. Each additional violation caught represents a potential lawsuit or payment processor fine avoided.

Data on 100% of violations occurring on Upwork

SafetyKit captures detailed analytics on every policy violation detected across the Upwork marketplace, enabling quantitative assessment of frequency, severity, and financial impact. This comprehensive data creates an audit trail that strengthens Upwork’s position with financial partners and regulators.