How to build a website like Fiverr

Freelance and micro-job platforms like Fiverr have become more and more popular as the shift toward remote work has accelerated. All kinds of businesses and even private individuals are looking for flexible solutions to outsource work.

Fiverr is one of the best-known freelance marketplace platforms. It connects companies around the world with top freelance talent.

Founded in Israel by Micha Kauffman and Shai Wininger in 2010, the platform is one of the pioneers of the future of work. Today, Fiverr offers digital services in more than 500 skills across 14 categories, from personal growth and hobbies to programming. 

In 2020, Fiverr connected more than 3.4 million buyers with freelancers in more than 160 countries. As of October 2024, Fiverr is a public company with a market cap of $0.88 billion.

Why did Fiverr become so successful? And why would an aspiring startup founder consider a business idea similar to Fiverr's? Let's look at the benefits of a platform like Fiverr for all three parties concerned: the freelancers, their clients, and the platform owner.

For freelancers, the benefits of a platform like Fiverr for a freelancer are:

• Acess to a large client pool
• Tools to manage their business, calendar, and billing
• A community of other freelancers to network with and learn from

It's tough being a freelancer. In addition to the work output clients contract, a freelancer needs to handle their own marketing and sales, scheduling and tracking contracts, and billing for their work.

Getting started as a freelancer with little upfront experience and connections can be quite the barrier of entry.

A marketplace like Fiverr can make all of this easier. The "community" aspect may sound like a soft benefit, but in reality, platforms like Fiverr can give freelancers lots of visibility, for example, into what others in their niche are offering, how they're positioning and packaging their offerings, and how much they are charging. This can be a powerful advantage that helps freelancers differentiate their offerings, develop their skills, and figure out a fair pricing level.

It's not surprising, then, that Fiverr seems to invest rather heavily in building a community around its freelancers by offering events, leadership, and mentoring programs, and lots of online material for learning how to succeed as a freelancer.

Clients stand a lot to gain from freelance sites like Fiverr. The client benefits include:

• Easy access to a large talent pool
• Easy freelancer management, work tracking, and invoices
• Transparency into freelancer pricing

Before platforms like Fiverr, clients had a much harder time sourcing quality freelancers. It was difficult to know what the general pricing and quality level in the freelancer markets were. In fact, before platforms like Fiverr made freelancing considerably easier, freelance talent was much more difficult to come by in the first place.

Nowadays, companies might even face the opposite problem: talent is so widely available across multiple platforms that finding a great match can feel like a needle-in-a-haystack situation. However, today platforms have different ways to solve this problem for their clients: by pre-vetting talent, offering additional manual matching services, and specializing in a narrower professional field or market (more on this topic later).

It's easy to see why freelancers and clients benefit from freelance marketplaces. What about the founders of these businesses? The founder benefits of businesses like Upwork include:

• Low startup cost and risk
• Phenomenal scalability
• Powerful marketplace growth dynamics.

First of all, today you can start a marketplace like Fiverr with a very low upfront investment.

You don't need to invest in hiring and training staff—freelancers create your service supply and are responsible for their own business.

Importantly, building a marketplace website has never been easier. A platform like Fiverr is a complicated website. Building such a site from scratch used to require a team of skilled developers and six-figure budget. Today, no-code marketplace builders like ours at Sharetribe let you launch a marketplace in a matter of days, at a fraction of the cost.

And finally, while the freelance market has several huge players like Fiverr, Upwork, and Thumbtack, that doesn't mean the opportunity is exhausted. On the contrary.

Existing marketplaces are seeing more and more competition from smaller, vertical players.

The strength of these marketplaces is that instead of offering a one-size-fits-all solution across categories, they can focus on serving a smaller audience group extremely well. For example, Mayple has carved itself a niche focusing on marketing talent and Sharetribe customer SoftwareSupp specializes in pre-vetted, high-quality software development talent.

In short: There’s never been a better time to launch a marketplace platform like Fiverr.

In the next two chapters, we’ll explore everything you need to know to build your own Fiverr-style marketplace business. 

Let’s dive in. 

Marketplace businesses like Fiverr make money primarily through commission. (In fact, according to a study we did at Sharetribe, by far the most of today's most successful marketplace use commission as their primary revenue model.)

Fiverr charges buyers a 5.5% fee, with an additional fee of $2 for orders under $50. When an order is completed, Fiverr takes an additional 20% commission from the freelancer’s payout. That means that on every sale through the Fiverr platform, the company makes over 25% in commission. 

The commission model is a popular revenue model for sites like Fiverr. It’s used by Fiverr competitors Upwork and Toptal, and it’s also favored by other popular marketplace businesses, including Etsy and Airbnb. 

As Fiverr has grown, the company has added new revenue streams. 

One is Fiverr Business, a $149/yr platform that makes it easier for large enterprises to collaborate with pre-screened freelancers on larger projects. Another is Promoted Gigs, a cost-per-click advertising product that lets freelancers appear higher in search results by boosting their “gigs”. 

While commission-based models tend to work best for marketplaces like Fiverr, you should consider a range of options when choosing the right marketplace business model for your marketplace.

It's no exaggeration to say your business model can make or break your marketplace. But even once you’ve settled on a business model, there are more decisions to be made. 

Say you opted for a commission-based revenue model, like Fiverr. Now, you need to determine how much to charge and who to charge—the buyer or the seller. Fiverr can charge sellers a 20% commission because it connects them to millions of buyers. At first, it’s unlikely a new marketplace will be able to justify such a high commission.

Furthermore, lower commission rates are a great competitive angle to win over freelancers from existing platforms to your new venture.

For new marketplaces, the fee structure must be low enough to attract new sellers but high enough for the business to make money. Marketplace websites cost money to run, and you need to create a sustainable revenue model that scales with your business. 

As you grow, take a leaf out of Fiverr’s book and consider adding new revenue models like premium memberships or advertising products.

Needless to say, benchmarking your closest competitors before you choose your revenue model and pricing level is a great idea.

A good source to get started with is the full data of our business model study, where you can filter and analyze the revenue strategies of existing successful marketplaces that are closest to your market.

Related: How to choose the right business model for your marketplace

Fiverr isn't the only big player targeting the growing freelance market. If you're considering building a freelance marketplace, you'll have no shortage of bigger and smaller platform competitors.

To understand how new entrants can find space to thrive, let's first look at how Fiverr's key competitors differentiate themselves, and then look at ideas that will help you do the same.

There are a range of other successful freelancer marketplace companies who offer similar but differentiated services to Fiverr. As you consider your own Fiverr-like marketplace idea, keep in mind the points of differentiation that Fiverr’s competitors have created:

Upwork is Fiverr’s largest competitor. They focus primarily on long-term engagements and large projects rather than the one-time “gigs” Fiverr specializes in. 

Upwork has a reverse marketplace flow: buyers post jobs, and sellers apply for them. This gives buyers more control over the scope of their projects and the ability to build long-term relationships with freelancers. Freelancers can seek out interesting projects and build a stable of long-term clients with reliable work. 

In many ways, Toptal is the opposite of Fiverr. Where Fiverr connects businesses with a wide range of freelancers at a low cost, Toptal connects businesses with a smaller number of high-quality freelancers at a high cost. Clients partner with Toptal experts to connect with well-matched freelancers.

Toptal rigorously screens freelancers before allowing them on the platform and claims to only include the top 3% of freelance talent on their platform. Toptal freelancers often boast backgrounds at top companies and sought-after skills like software development and product management.

Fiverr initially started with only $5 gigs, but as the platform has grown, services have become more expensive. Platforms like Truelancer have stepped in to fill the gap, connecting companies with freelancers from low-cost-of-living countries. 

Contra positions itself as "the commission-free freelance platform", where freelancers get to keep 100% of their earnings. Contra's fees for the client side are also structured differently than on most other freelance marketplaces: it charges a flat fee for one-time projects and a monthly fee for recurring projects and a small commission as a transaction fee.

The easiest route to creating differentiation is often to focus on one particular niche. For example, Contentfly focuses on content writing, Mayple focuses exclusively on marketing talent, and SoftwareSupp on software development work. 

Paperound and SoftwareSupp are powered by Sharetribe software. Specialized micro-jobs marketplaces like these make it easier for buyers to find the right talent for their projects. For founders, it’s easy to tailor the features of the platform to closely match the needs of users.

To compete effectively with a well-established marketplace platform like Fiverr, there are a few things to bear in mind. Focus on solving a very specific problem better than Fiverr does. Make sure your problem applies to a large enough group of people. And figure out a scalable business model that attracts sellers and buyers to your marketplace. 

Our advice? Start by focusing on a small niche or geography, and once you’ve gained initial traction, start expanding into new areas. 

If you're interested in learning more from successful founders, I recommend this podcast episode where our CMO Sjoerd interviews Sophie Adelman, co-founder of the apprentice marketplace WhiteHat (now Multiverse) and ex-Hired (now LHH Recruitment Solutions), on talent marketplaces and the future of work.

I also recommend checking out our interview with Connor Gillivan, founder of FreeUp, a freelance marketplace for the eCommerce industry. Connor discusses his journey with FreeUp and shares how his startup is successfully taking on marketplace giants like Fiverr and Upwork. 

Building a website like Fiverr is complicated. Competition is fierce, and it’s impossible to carve out a niche for your marketplace without creating a smooth user experience that gives users all of the essential features that they need. 

It’s likely that many buyers on your Fiverr-like marketplace will be established businesses. This adds a layer of complexity: a lot of businesses have specific requirements when it comes to entering contracts, sharing privileged information, and processing payments. Building trust between buyers and sellers on your platform is critical as well.

Specializing in a small niche in the beginning (even if you plan to scale to new markets eventually) helps you tackle these challenges and serve your audience better.

Under the hood, the core features of most Fiverr-like websites are always the same. This is good news for aspiring marketplace entrepreneurs because that means you don't need to pay to reinvent the wheel.

When Fiverr first started, even the most basic features had to be built from scratch. Such a task would take months of development. Nowadays, there are many kinds of shortcuts (such as our no-code marketplace builder) that can cut that time radically.

Next, I'll briefly discuss the essential building blocks of websites like Fiverr and then move on to comparing a few alternative solutions to build your platform.

Fiverr is a two-sided marketplace platform that enables people to buy and sell professional services online. The platform started out offering services like translation and logo design for $5, and now offers hundreds of services at different prices.

Freelancers create a profile on the site and set up their own “gigs”. Each “gig” is a project offered by a freelancer – for example, creating a short animated video. These “gigs” summarize the freelancers’ skills and experience and outline the projects available at various price points. 

Clients search for “gigs” and freelancers that meet their needs and then pay in advance. Funds are held in escrow until the successful completion of the project. 

Freelancers get access to a large pool of customers, the flexibility to work on their own schedule, and the opportunity to earn money on the Fiverr platform. For buyers, Fiverr is a quick, affordable way to outsource work to a diverse talent pool without compromising on quality. 
There are essentially two main types of micro-jobs marketplaces:

1. Regular marketplaces like Fiverr, where sellers post jobs and clients contact them.
2. Reverse marketplaces like Upwork, where clients post job descriptions and sellers apply to them.

The type you choose has a big impact on the feature requirements for your job platform. Let's look more closely at the core features that build a marketplace user experience like Fiverr's.

These are some of the features almost every website like Fiverr will always need, regardless of the niche they focus on. This is good news for aspiring marketplace founders! That means it's possible to take advantage of marketplace software like Sharetribe's and save months working on basic features.

When it comes to building out your Fiverr-style website, there are a range of options to consider.

The path you take will be driven by the features that your unique marketplace needs, the technical skills your team has, and the level of budget and time you’re willing to spend on building your platform.

There are many ways to develop a marketplace. Here are the four most relevant to building a micro-jobs marketplace like Fiverr. 

Before we get to how to build your marketplace, an important recommendation that we've heard from countless marketplace founders and experts over the years: start with a Minimum Viable Platform, or MVP.

That means don't build your perfect, fully-featured, ideal-world Fiverr alternative first.

Instead, begin with a simple version that does two things exceptionally well:

1. Solves your suppliers’ core problem.
2. Solves your customers’ core problem.

During the MVP phase, handling some tasks manually is fine, even if you plan to automate them later. Many successful marketplace founders connected supply and demand manually at first.

For example, Charles Armitage, who founded the UK healthcare staffing marketplace Florence, told us their first version was a Google Sheet and lots of manual work. (This is after they first commissioned a marketplace MVP from a development agency, spent months and quite a bit of money, only to discover the product didn't work at all).

Or, if you need more inspiration, look no further than Fiverr. The first version of the website was hardly feature-rich or visually stunning. Instead, it let users do one thing really well: post and search five-dollar jobs.

The beauty of the MVP approach is that it lets you get your business out into the world quickly. The beauty of getting out into the world quickly is that you can learn and engage directly with early adopters.

This kind iterative approach saves you a lot of time and money—and helps you ensure when you do spend them, it will be on building the right things.

Now, let's explore different ways to build the first version (and the subsequent versions) of your Fiverr altenrative.

If you’re experienced in frontend and backend development, custom building a marketplace platform from scratch is possible. But even for experienced developers, this is a complicated project, and will likely take several months.

Our Full Stack Developer, Mikko, has written a guide to the process of developing a marketplace app from scratch. 

The most obvious benefit of building from scratch is that you can create the exact feature set and design that you want for your marketplace. Done right, it’s possible to build a scalable core architecture that is not dependent on any third-party software or systems.

While custom development seems attractive at first, the drawbacks significantly outweigh the benefits. Building from scratch can take months, and maintaining every aspect of your own infrastructure is costly and exhausting. You’ll spend the majority of the development process coding the basic elements of the platform, not innovating exciting new features. 

If you’re not a developer, outsourcing this process can cost upwards of $50,000, and development timelines will be even longer. Even when your marketplace is ready, it’s difficult to make changes or add new features without support from your external developers, pushing costs higher still. 

As marketplaces become increasingly popular, new possibilities are emerging that offer entrepreneurs new ways to build marketplace platforms. One approach is to use clone scripts, which give developers the basic building blocks of a marketplace. With these scripts as the foundation, code can be tweaked to suit the needs of each unique marketplace, and developers can spend more time building exciting new features.

Clone scripts can save time and money by enabling developers to use someone else's code as the key building blocks of the marketplace. 

If you take this approach, look for high-quality open-source code. Try to use scripts that include lots of pre-built features – that way, you won’t have to build lots of your own features on top.

Clone scripts promise shortcuts, but in reality, there are many risks in using them to build your business. 

All too often, there are major gaps in these scripts. If the code isn’t built to be customized, it’s difficult for developers to work with it – there may be redundant code, interdependencies, or a lack of documentation and technical support. Critical features like online payments are often not developed to the standard of local and global regulations. 

There’s also the question of scale. When you first start working with the script, it’s difficult to know how well the infrastructure will scale. What works for 1,000 users might not work for 10,000 and almost certainly won’t work for 1,000,000 users. Plus, managing maintenance, backups, and security can become a full-time job if your marketplace reaches a meaningful scale.

It’s easy to end up with a ‘“worst-of-both-worlds” situation, where your marketplace lacks customization and is impossible to launch and scale. 

If you’ve built websites on WordPress before, it could be possible to use a WordPress theme to build your marketplace. This helps get your platform up and running fairly quickly but isn’t without issues, leaving your marketplace reliant on a complex combination of WordPress plugins and themes. 

WordPress is relatively affordable, and there are multiple payment options. 

Users also benefit from access to the complete WordPress codebase, as well as a huge range of different plugins and themes to add features and design elements to their platform.

While easier than custom development, using WordPress still requires fairly sophisticated development skills. Building a unique marketplace requires a network of plugins and themes. All of them need to be manually installed and maintained on your platform. If one plugin fails or needs an update, your entire marketplace could go offline. This challenge can become even more pronounced as your business scales.

Online payments are also an issue with this approach. It’s difficult to process marketplace payments and stay compliant with regulations when using WordPress. The lack of customization in payments also extends to other areas, and it’s challenging to build new marketplace features. 

The best way to build a website like Fiverr is to use a dedicated marketplace platform like Sharetribe. These offer entrepreneurs the ability to launch quickly with minimal investment and the flexibility to add more advanced features as the marketplace grows. 

Marketplace software comes with all of the features you need to get started, making it easy to get your marketplace up and running quickly. All you have to do is create an account, add your copy, color scheme, and logo, and you’re ready to launch.

There’s little in the way of upfront investment (you can configure your marketplace settings completely fee with Sharetribe and only need to subscribe once you're ready to invite in users), and founders need little to no technical skills to get started. Maintenance is taken care of, and new features are constantly added that improve the marketplace experience for your users. 

While it’s easy to get started with a marketplace software platform, it can be difficult to fully customize features. Usually, you don’t get access to the source code that powers your marketplace, and the feature set offered can be a little more limited than on platforms like WordPress. 

Fortunately, Sharetribe allows founders to customize and self-host their front-end application when they’re ready to add more advanced features to their marketplace. This requires some development but ensures you can add important features to your marketplace without worrying about issues like online payments or maintaining your system architecture. 

1. Create your free Sharetribe account and enter your details. 
2. Add your marketplace's name.
3. Build your marketplace's landing page: add a slogan and description that explains what your marketplace does, upload visual assets, and more. Unsplash has great free images, but if you have some budget, check out Stocksy for creative, hand-selected visuals.
4. Determine the design of your marketplace: upload a logo and other visual assets photo, and choose the layout of your search page and listing pages.
5. Configure your listing settings, listing fields, and search settings.
6. Choose your commission and minimum transaction size.
7. Test that everything looks like and works to your liking in your Test environment.
8. Once everything is ready, it's time to subscribe!
9. Activate online payments by connecting a Stripe account. You’ll be able to receive payments and collect commissions straight away.
10. Check everything over one last time.
11. Congratulations – your Fiverr site is ready to go. 🚀

For more information on setting up Sharetribe, check out our Help Center or chat with our Support Team - they’re available seven days a week.

Once you’re up and running, focus on growing your marketplace. Sharetribe lets you launch a powerful marketplace platform quickly and affordaably, giving entrepreneurs more time to focus on building out their user base.

Spend time with the users of your marketplace, and collect their feedback. Ask them how things could be improved, and learn about what’s important to them.

As you continue to grow your marketplace, the chances are that you’ll want to extend and customize your platform to provide a better experience for your users. Building a marketplace is a continuous process—Fiverr has been around for more than ten years and is still adding new features!

When you’re ready to embark on the next stage of your entrepreneurial journey, you can do so with Sharetribe without changing platforms or migrating data. Sharetribe is a powerful marketplace solution that allows you to launch completely no-code but also offers the flexibility to design and develop custom features. Essentially, it gives you the best of both worlds: all the essential building blocks out-of-the-box as well as infinite customizability through Sharetribe's Marketplace and Integration APIs. 

Custom-developing functionality on top of Sharetribe does take some technical skills, but if that’s not you, fear not! We can connect you with a Sharetribe Expert Partner. We also have a great guide full of useful tips on hiring a marketplace developer. Building a custom platform on Sharetribe gives you the freedom to build out powerful new features and grow your marketplace without limits.

Building a successful micro jobs platform like Fiverr doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, you can get your marketplace up and running today, without writing a single line of code.

At Sharetribe, we’ve been helping founders to build and grow exciting marketplaces for more than a decade now. We’ve learned a lot along the way. Check out the Marketplace Academy to learn more about how you can build a successful marketplace business. 

But in the end, there’s only so much you can learn by reading. The best way to learn is to dive in. Start building your marketplace, launch as fast as possible, and spend time with your users to learn how you can build a platform that empowers them. 

If you’ve ever thought about building a micro jobs marketplace, there’s never been a better time in history than right now. Demand is booming across a wide variety of categories, and innovative marketplace builder technology means that anyone can start building the next Fiverr, today.

Take the first step today and start building for free with Sharetribe.