upwork-research

Upwork research

Search Upwork job postings and pull freelancer profiles — all as normalized JSON from the Crawlora API, no scraping Upwork's pages by hand.

When to use this skill

• "Search Upwork for <skill/role> jobs." — free-text keyword search over public job listings.
• "Show me this Upwork job posting." — full detail (budget, description, client history) for one posting by id.
• "Look up this Upwork freelancer." — profile, hourly rate, Job Success Score, ratings, and recent client feedback by freelancer id.
• "What's the going rate for on Upwork?" — collect budgets across search results to estimate a market rate.
• "Vet this freelancer before hiring." — pull their profile and feedback history in one call.

Setup (one-time)

• Get a free Crawlora API key (2,000 credits/mo, no card) at https://crawlora.net.
• Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY in the environment before running the helper.
• The helper reads CRAWLORA_API_KEY from the environment and sends requests to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Missing/invalid key → 401.

How it works

1. Search — /upwork/search takes a free-text keyword (q) and returns normalized job summaries (title, budget, experience level, duration, posted date, description snippet, skill tags), paginated via page.
2. Job detail — take an id from a search result and call /upwork/job/{id} for the full posting: description, employment type, budget (hourly range or fixed amount), location/remote type, experience level, duration, project type, proposal count, allowed applicant countries, and a summary of the posting client (member since, location, spend, hires, hours, industry, company size).
3. Freelancer profile — /upwork/freelancer/{id} returns a normalized profile: name, title, verification badge, overview, hourly rate, rating and review count, Job Success Score, location and local time, total jobs/hours worked, and recent client feedback (title, comment, date, client name, rating).

Full endpoint list, methods, and params: reference/endpoints.md.

Calling the API

# Search jobs by keyword:
scripts/crawlora.sh /upwork/search q="react developer" | jq '.'

# Job detail (id from a search result):
scripts/crawlora.sh /upwork/job/<job_id> | jq '.'

# Freelancer profile (id from a search result or a known profile):
scripts/crawlora.sh /upwork/freelancer/<freelancer_id> | jq '.'

Use scripts/crawlora.sh for all requests; it keeps the API key out of command-line arguments.

Endpoint reference

See reference/endpoints.md for all Upwork endpoints this skill uses.

Examples

• Freelance rate-check: /upwork/search for a skill (e.g. q="react developer"), collect the budget field across results to estimate a market rate for that skill.
• Freelancer due diligence: /upwork/search or a known id to find a candidate, then /upwork/freelancer/{id} to check their Job Success Score, hourly rate, hours worked, and recent client feedback before reaching out.

Notes & limits

• Credits / pay-on-success: billed only on 2xx; free tier 2,000 credits/mo. Key at https://crawlora.net.
• Public data only — public postings/profiles; respect Upwork's terms.
• Security: key lives in CRAWLORA_API_KEY only — never hardcode, query-param, or commit it.
• Job and freelancer ids come from search results — grab the id field from /upwork/search output rather than guessing one.
• Data is sourced from Upwork's own server-rendered pages via a real browser-rendering backend, so fields reflect exactly what's publicly visible on the page (no data behind Upwork's login wall).
• /upwork/search is paginated — pass page to walk past the first page of results.