We built TroveWork to make freelancing safer
One of the biggest problems with freelance platforms is trust.
Freelancers often waste time on fake projects or dishonest clients. Clients also deal with fake profiles, spam proposals, and freelancers who misrepresent their experience.
Our agency recently built TroveWork to address this problem.
Every freelancer must be verified before they can find projects or contact clients. We also verify clients to reduce fake projects and scams.
We are still in the early stage, but we already have more than 50 genuine freelancers and over 30 verified clients. There are no platform fees for now.
Our goal is to build a freelance marketplace where both freelancers and clients can feel safe working with each other.
We know verification adds an extra step during registration, but we think it is worth it if it helps create a trustworthy community.
You can visit it at trovework.com.
I would really appreciate honest feedback from the Indie Hackers community. Would verification make you more comfortable using a new freelance platform? What else would you want us to add?
The strongest part is tackling trust on both sides of the marketplace rather than treating fraud as only a freelancer problem. The early verified-user numbers are a useful signal, but the bigger question is whether verification creates enough difference to overcome the usual marketplace liquidity problem.
Trust is the right wedge, but from the freelancer side the scary part usually isn't "will I get paid at all" — it's scope drift that quietly turns a 10-hour project into 30. Two things I'd suggest testing, because they're where I've seen disputes actually start: (1) make the deliverable list a structured field, not prose. If both sides have to check off "3 revisions, 2 pages, source files included," 80% of "but I assumed..." arguments never happen. (2) Timestamp scope changes as first-class events in the project, so a request that arrives mid-build shows as "added on day 6" rather than being remembered differently by each party. Milestone-level escrow (release per checkpoint, not one lump at the end) also cuts risk for both sides more than any verification badge. I sell a small ops-template kit for solo freelancers, and honestly the highest-value page in it is just the scope + revision-limit checklist — that's how boring and how important this part is. Would use something that enforced it natively.