• Clear website

• Way too many emails sent urging me to pay for more upgrades.
• Claims 100% Satisfaction but the DesignCrowd fees are NOT refundable.
• Very low turnout from designers.

I was lured to their 100% satisfaction guarantee. After putting in the design brief, you play around with the budget. I was promised 50-65 designs from 23 designers for the amount I specified. After you make the payment, you keep getting bombarded with messages on the site as well as via email that you should add all sorts of PAID upgrades to ensure you get designs. You are also introduced to their REAL cancellation policy: only the amount to the designer is refundable. DesignCrowd fees are NOT!

I have contacted DesignCrowd already at the start asking about the low turnout. All I could get was, please upgrade or invite designers. They also said they would send invites on my behalf. This resulted in several spam emails per day say: designer X accepted (and usually rejected) your invitation. Who cares??? They also included regular CRM emails urging me to upgrade my contest (paid) to get more offers.

When trying to cancel the contest and get a refund, they would not let me do that for 10 days until the official close of the contest and then they wanted another week to process it. In any case, they would not refund THEIR fee. So at the end of the day, they want to make money even though the buyer did not get what he wanted and the designers did not get anything. Nice marketplace!

I have to mention that I ran a contest with 99Designs where the results were not much better. Although 99Designs insisted on calling them via phone to cancel, they did make a FULL refund.

I think that the promise of a design contest sounds nice in theory, in practice it proved a waste of time and money for me. Better to spend a little more time evaluating designers and commissioning one or two for a small project and if you are happy, for more work.