I have been doing freelancing work on one of the most popular freelancing websites for a year or two now and can share some experiences.
It is kinda hit and miss with many freelances. The good one's usually cost 25 USD+ for people in asia. To get decent quality in the western world it is usually around 40-50 usd per hour.
Jobs from the US usually have realistic budgets. Many jobs from EU are a lot of work with a realistic wage of 20-30 usd per hour
and a lot of hassle as in conferencing for hours and those kind of things basically for free. The majority of companies that advertise on these platforms
are the one's that want everything but very cheap. The companies that will pay a somewhat decent hourly rate are generally not on these platforms.
Have "competed" against people in the EU or abroad that should be much more experienced than me. But after checking their work found
several basic errors which would make the product fail completely.
I have worked with freelances from Asia before but unless they have to do basic pre-planned work this has not ended in success in my experience.
(of-course there are good and bad one's but I'm just talking from my experience. And those are top rated, worked many hours and are not cheap kind of guys)
And what also happens is that some ask for like 20 usd per hour. But just use a multiplier of 2.5x
to get the rate they really want.
I'm registered on freelancer . com but that website really is a race to the bottom kind of place. With descriptions like "hey I want to build a drone pcb" and that is all the info you have to place a bid on. No possibility to ask for more information or whatever. For the 30 jobs I checked today the majority of them are like this.
The majority of my time I'm based in Shenzhen China , depending on the job I might temporary lower my rate.
The people that really make the big bucks are the platforms themselves they make 10-20% fee + withdrawal fee's / gain due to exchange rate + "premium" packages
A good chunk of my time I spend finding new (good) clients and discussing with potential ones instead of doing actual work.