I have been using Elance/Upwork for the last 10 years and I have never left a negative review before. The majority of my projects involve web-development so I am familiar working within a technical setting. I provided Synapse with a very clear project specification, PSD designs for all pages, and a visualisation document to work from. All that was needed was for them to convert the PSD pages and follow the clear instructions within my specification. At every stage of this project the Synapse team struggled. The hiring managers struggled to give me a fixed quote - I received 4 different quotes from 2 different hiring managers [the price only ever increased even though the scope didn't increase - I can provide evidence] The hiring manager failed to incorporate key elements of my specification into his official contract. It took us one week to confirm the contract simply because the hiring manager kept leaving things out. I am starting to think he done this deliberately to reduce the scope of the work for his team. The design team failed to test all PSD pages before submitting them to me for review. I found multiple errors with overlapping elements as well as scaling issues. The dev team selected were really really poor. They provided very poor buggy work - this has been verified. Absolutely no testing was done before work was submitted for my review. All testing was done by my team - even though Synapse initially promised that they would be testing the work first. What's most concerning is the complete lack of integrity. On more than one occasion, the project manager tried to get me to release funds for a milestone, even though he knew that the milestone in question wasn't fully complete. When I told him that the work was buggy and asked him to revise it, he would quickly hash together a quick fix which was slightly better, but ultimately incorrect and still buggy. Because he didn't test the work, my team again had to test and return the work back to him to fix. As you can imagine this consumed 'a lot of time'. I decided to continue work with another development team - starting from scratch. Synapse offered to assign me a new team, but at this point I had lost faith in the company as a whole. The provider missed every deadline and never once apologised or acknowledged this. The project had started on 15th April and 4 months later they had only produced a half functioning registration page. I was 4 months behind schedule and down $4,000 - I wasn't prepared to give the provider any more time or money. Please be very careful before considering providers on Upwork. Because of the way Upwork is structured it is easy for providers to hide bad company feedback by setting up many individual accounts. What's more, if a provider ends the contract, then the client will have a very short amount of time to leave feedback. Many clients are unaware of this and as a result many client's lose out on the opportunity to leave negative feedback. When the client misses this window then the project will read 'No feedback given'. Please note that the majority of feedback for SynapseIndia reads 'No feedback given'. This is very very telling.Update: Upwork allows providers to remove negative feedback. Please google 'Remove Upwork Feedback' for more info. Synapse have removed this review and my 1 star rating from their official Upwork profile. It's like the project never happened. Avoid upwork altogether is my personal advice.
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