Part 1

What this guide is

This is the whole of Furrsati from the working side, in the order you will meet it, from making an account to getting money out of it in Lebanon. It assumes you have never used the platform and it does not skip the awkward parts.

1.1Who this is for

You do work that somebody else pays for, design, development, writing, translation, marketing, accounting, video, or anything adjacent, and you want that to happen without chasing an invoice for three months. This guide is the freelancer's half of the platform. The client's half is a separate document, linked at the top of this page.

You do not need an existing client base to start, and you do not need to be full-time. A large share of the people working here treat it as a second income alongside a job.

1.2The one idea worth understanding first

On Furrsati the client pays before you start, and we hold that money. You can see it is held. You do the work, they approve it, and it is released to you. If they go quiet instead of approving, the money does not go back to them on its own, somebody at Furrsati looks at the project and decides.

1.3How long any of this takes

Making an account is a couple of minutes. A profile worth sending to a client is closer to half an hour, most of it spent uploading work you have already done. Identity verification is a photograph of a document and a wait for a person to look at it.

Part 2

Create your account

Four screens, no card, and nothing you cannot change afterwards except one thing.

2.1Say that you are here to work

The first screen asks whether you are looking for work or looking to hire. Choose working. This decides what the entire app looks like afterwards, the two sides are genuinely different products, not the same screens with different labels.

2.2Email and password

Use an address you actually read. Every invitation, message, proposal result and payout notice goes there, and an invitation that sits unread for four days is a project somebody else took.

You can sign up with Google, LinkedIn or Apple instead, which skips the password. Whichever you choose, confirm the email before you go looking for work, an unverified account cannot send a proposal.

2.3Your name and phone number

Use the name you want a client to see and the name on your identity document. When the two disagree, verification takes longer and a payout can be held while somebody works out which is you.

The phone number is how we reach you about money, a payout that failed, a document that was rejected. It is not shown to clients.

2.4Install the app

Everything here works in a browser, but the app is where you will actually live: proposals, messages, voice notes, calls and the moment a milestone is funded all arrive as notifications rather than as emails you find later.

Part 3

Build a profile somebody would hire

This is the highest-value half hour you will spend on the platform. A client decides whether to open your proposal from your profile, not from your message.

3.1Your fields and your title

Pick up to three fields. The first is your primary one, it decides the colour on your card, which category pages you appear on, and which projects you are matched to. Choose the one you most want to be hired for, not the one you have done most of.

Your title is the line under your name and it is doing more work than your bio. "Full-Stack Developer" is fine. "Shopify developer for small Lebanese retailers" is better, because it tells a specific client they have found the right person.

3.2Work somebody can look at

Upload finished pieces with a title and a sentence about what the job actually was. Six strong pieces beat twenty, and the first three are what most people see before deciding.

If your work is not visual, writing, accounting, translation, support, screenshot it, redact the client's name, and show the artefact anyway. A page of a report is evidence. A description of a report is a claim.

3.3Your rate

The hourly rate on your profile is a signal, not a contract, most work here is priced per milestone. Set it to what you would genuinely accept. A rate you would refuse costs you the clients who could afford you and attracts the ones who cannot.

3.4A face and a short bio

A real photograph of your face, cropped close, in daylight. This is a marketplace where somebody is about to send money to a stranger in another city, and a profile with no face is the one they scroll past.

Keep the bio to a short paragraph: what you do, who you do it for, and how you work. Nobody reads a page of it, and the adjectives everybody uses, passionate, detail-oriented, creative, carry no information because everybody uses them.

Part 4

Get verified

Identity verification is the one piece of admin on this platform, it happens once, and it is what stands between approved work and money in your hand.

4.1What it does and does not block

You can sign up, build a profile, browse, propose, be hired and do the work without it. What you cannot do is withdraw. Verification gates the money leaving the platform, and nothing before that.

4.2What to send

A government identity document, an ID card, a passport or a driving licence, photographed flat, in daylight, with all four corners in frame and nothing cropped.

Flat on a plain surface, not held up at an angle.
No flash, the glare erases exactly the line somebody needs to read.
All four corners visible, including the edges.
The name matching the name on your account.

4.3How long the review takes

A person reviews it, usually within a working day. You are notified either way, and if it is rejected you are told what was wrong with it rather than being left to guess.

Part 5

Find work

Work reaches you three ways, and only one of them is applying for something.

5.1Open projects

Every open project is listed with its budget, its category and how many people have already applied. Those three numbers tell you whether it is worth writing for before you have read a word of the brief.

5.2Invitations

Clients can browse freelancers and invite specific people to a project. An invitation means somebody looked at your profile and chose you, the reply rate on these is far higher than on open applications, and they are the direct return on the half hour you spent on your profile.

Answer them quickly even when the answer is no. A client who is told "not my field, but here is what I would look for" remembers that, and invitations tend to come from the same small group of people who hire repeatedly.

5.3Sell a fixed-price service

You can publish a defined piece of work at a fixed price with a delivery time, a logo, a landing page, a set of subtitles, a month of bookkeeping. A client buys it outright, with no brief and no proposal.

5.4Paid consultations

You can let clients book a video call with you, free or paid, before any project exists. For work that needs scoping before it can be quoted, this turns the unpaid discovery call every freelancer resents into either a paid hour or a qualified client.

Part 6

Write a proposal that gets read

A proposal here is a price and a plan, not a cover letter. The client is comparing yours against several others on one screen.

6.1The number

Quote what the work costs, not what you think will win. Undercutting on this platform is unusually visible: the client sees every proposal side by side, and the cheapest one in a row of considered quotes reads as somebody who has not understood the brief.

Before you send it, the app shows what you would actually receive after the standard platform fee for your account. Quote against that figure rather than the headline one, so the number you agreed is the number you wanted.

6.2Split it into milestones

A milestone is an amount, a piece of work and a date. Splitting a project into three or four is not bureaucracy, it is how you get paid along the way instead of at the end, and how a client who is nervous about a stranger agrees to start at all.

Make the first one small and quick. It is the one that proves you are real.
End each one on something the client can look at and judge, not on an internal stage like "research complete".
Do not put more than about a third of the total in any single later milestone.

6.3What to actually write

Three short paragraphs is plenty: what you understood the job to be, how you would approach it, and one piece of your work that is closest to it. Nobody reads more than that while comparing eight proposals.

6.4After you send it

The client can counter your price, your timing or your milestones, and you can counter back. There is no limit on rounds and either side can walk away at any point before money is placed. Nothing binds you until a milestone is funded.

Part 7

Agreed, and funded

The moment your proposal is accepted, the project becomes a contract and the client is asked to fund the first milestone.

7.1What "funded" actually means

The client has paid, and we are holding the money. It is not in their account. They cannot cancel it and take it back on their own once you have started. You can see the milestone marked funded before you do anything.

7.2If it is ongoing work

Work with no natural end, a monthly social calendar, ongoing bookkeeping, a support arrangement, can be a retainer instead, billed by the day, week or month. Each period is funded before it starts, the same way a milestone is.

7.3Write down what is not included

The most common dispute on any freelancing platform is not fraud, it is two people who honestly believed different things were in scope. Before you start, put one message on the project saying what the milestone covers and what it does not, and how many rounds of revisions come with it.

Part 8

Doing the work

Everything about the project, messages, files, voice notes, calls, deliveries, happens on the project itself. That is not an inconvenience; it is the record.

8.1Talking to the client

The project has a full conversation: text, attachments, voice notes and video calls. Use it, including for the quick questions you would normally send on WhatsApp.

Send a short update even when there is nothing to report. Silence from a freelancer is what makes a client anxious, and an anxious client is the one who opens a dispute over a delay they would otherwise have accepted.

8.2Delivering a milestone

Attach the work to the project and submit the milestone. It moves to awaiting approval and the client is notified. Do not send the final files by email or a personal link, a file the platform never saw is a file that does not exist if this is ever disputed.

8.3When they ask for changes

The client can ask for changes instead of approving. The money stays held exactly where it is while you make them, it does not go back to them, and it does not come to you yet.

If a request is outside what you agreed, say so plainly and price it as an additional milestone. Scope grows one small favour at a time, and the freelancer who says yes to all of them is the one who ends up working a second project for free.

Part 9

Getting paid, and getting it out

Approval releases the money to your wallet. Withdrawing moves it from the wallet to you, in Lebanon.

9.1Approval releases the money

When the client approves, the held amount is released to your Furrsati wallet in US dollars, less the standard platform fee for your account. Approving is also what opens the next milestone, so the project moves on in the same action.

Your balance separates what is still held for you on running projects from what is available to withdraw, so you always know which number is real money today.

9.2The four ways out

Request a withdrawal from your wallet and choose how it reaches you.

Method	Good for
OMT	Cash pickup anywhere in Lebanon, no bank account needed
Whish Money	Cash or wallet, widely available locally
Bank transfer	Larger amounts you want to keep in a bank
Crypto	Holding in dollars outside the local banking system

9.3Why there are four of them

Because a Lebanese freelancer's problem is rarely earning the money, it is getting it out. Any single rail here has periods where it is inconvenient or unavailable, and being able to change how you take money out without changing where you earn it is most of the point.

Part 10

If something goes wrong

The common failure is not fraud. It is a client who stops replying, or two people who disagree about what was promised.

10.1You delivered and they went quiet

The money is already held, so silence does not cost you it. Message them on the project, wait a reasonable few days, and then open a dispute on the milestone.

10.2Opening a dispute

Either side can open one on a funded milestone. The money freezes where it is, both of you submit what you have, and somebody at Furrsati reads the project and decides within 48 hours.

Released to you, in full.
Refunded to the client.
Split between you.

The evidence is the project itself: the brief, the agreed milestone, the messages, the files and the dates they were sent. This is the reason the work belongs on the platform rather than in a chat app, everything a decision needs is already there without either of you assembling a case.

10.3What actually protects you

Never start unfunded work.
Write the scope down on the project before you begin.
Deliver through the platform, every time.
Keep the conversation here, including the quick questions.
Say no to off-platform payment, however reasonable the reason sounds.

Part 11

Your account, and growing on it

What happens after the first project is what decides whether this becomes a living or stays an experiment.

11.1Reviews are the compound interest

A completed project and the review that follows sit on your profile permanently, and they are what the next client reads instead of taking your word for anything. The first three are worth more than any amount of profile polish.

Ask for one. A client who was happy will usually leave a review and will usually not think to on their own.

11.2The second project with the same client

A client who has worked with you once can hire you directly with a custom offer, without posting anything publicly, or put you on a retainer. There is no proposal to write and no competition. Most freelancers who do well here are working with a small number of clients repeatedly rather than winning a new one every week.

11.3Account settings worth knowing about

Notifications, turn on the ones for invitations and funded milestones; those are the two that are time-sensitive.
Payout details, keep them current, because a failed transfer is a slow thing to fix.
Availability, mark yourself unavailable rather than ignoring invitations you cannot take.
Deleting your account, self-service in settings, and it does not remove the record of money that has already moved.

11.4Getting help

Support is in the app and on the contact page, and a person reads it, usually the same day. For anything about money, message from the project it concerns: it saves a round of questions establishing which one you mean.