Fancy Hands: An Honest Review for Virtual Assistants

What is Fancy Hands?

Fancy Hands enlists freelance virtual assistants to complete what they say are 20-minute “tasks” for clients. But the tasks can take much longer, which makes the pay poor.

How it works

The site encourages freelancers to sign up and take tasks whenever they have time — at any hour of the day or night. That makes the job highly flexible.

The catch is that each Fancy Hands “task” is assumed to be a 20 minute job, for which the client pays only $5 – $10. That means the worker gets less. The site says workers earn $3 to $7 per task. But, workers say that the jobs take far longer than 20 minutes, so their hourly pay ends up being only a few dollars an hour.

Fancy Hands Review:

Fancy Hand’s concept is good. Both individuals and companies can off-load some of their daily tasks to Fancy Hand’s virtual assistants.

You might have the assistant find you a better cable company, for instance. Or you could ask them research who might provide a particular product or service in your neighborhood. Or schedule appointments.

But, the assistant gets a set amount of pay for each task. And virtual assistants say that tasks are not considered complete until the client says they are, so you could work all day on your 20-minute “task” without any extra pay.

Mentors

Worse, any communication between the virtual assistant and the company requesting the task has to go through a “mentor.” This can make it impossible to get the job done, which means the VA doesn’t get paid at all.

Miserable pay

In the best of circumstances, you’d say that getting paid $3 per 20-minute task would cause you to earn $9 per hour. But if the task takes additional time, worker wages end up in the basement. And that’s exactly what workers complain about.

Recommendations

There are many better places to find virtual assisting work, including Belay and Time Etc. You can also offer your own VA packages on Fiverr. (But be sure to read our Fiverr review before you structure your offer.)

If you still want to work with Fancy Hands, you can find them here.

What their virtual assistants say: (from Indeed)

The pay is based on the amount of tasks you complete and what they are. Most tasks usually pay anyway from $.50 cents to $10 some are even $15. However if the task pays more, chances are you’re going to have to book someone’s flight, find out stock information, finish their degree for them, climb Mt Everest… you see where I’m going with this.

Every email between you and the client has to be approved, it can take hours or days for that to happen, and then you get snarky emails that your tasks is going to be reassigned for not working on it.

Rotten pay

This company went viral on a couple side hustle websites and blogs but here is a real review. Plan on making about $20 a week. Sometimes it is more but this would be the average. It is not enough to live off of.

$3/20 minutes = $9/hr. I usually wouldn’t see that $9/hr because the company fights with you like asking for more credits will kill them, like as if your work and time isn’t worth more than $6/hr

Sweat shop

THIS IS A SWEAT SHOP. By being a contractor company, it can get away with offering $3 for an initial research task and stringing you along for 5 full days of work and still “unclaiming” the task from you at the end and not paying you at all.

“You can literally work all day on a $6 task because you’re going back and forth with mentors that don’t actually read.”

“Pay is less than minimum wage. You might get three dollars for an hour or more of work. If customer asks a question AFTER YOU FINISHED A TASK, the task reopens and you don’t get paid until you respond. If customer wants more work on the task, you lose your money until you ABSOLUTELY 100% satisfy the customer. So, a 5 min. task that pays $1-$3 can actually take you HOURS to finish, or you forfeit your money!!!!!”

Unreasonable demands

“After really trying everyday for 3 months, I managed to make a total of $200 because they cheat and take back half your money, force you to use their money transfer services instead of direct deposit or Paypal,  and allow customers to make completely unreasonable requests that are impossible to complete. They need to review the tasks BEFORE offering it to workers. Some tasks may include asking you to do something that borderlines on illegal because the managers don’t care, don’t review the tasks before posting, and just want to get your money!”

“The upside is you can work whenever you want and choose your tasks. Choose wisely or the task will continue to grow. Cons: What many clients, and some of the mentors, consider to be a 20 minute task borders on the absurd. Many tasks are not clearly defined. Asking a question opens the door to rude responses from some clients as well as mentors.

Ridiculous

Management claims all tasks will take between 15-20 minutes when in reality they take at least an hour. “Large tasks” for more money are rarely approved and for minimal increase at best. All tasks have a time limit where it will be taken away from you if not completed and allow another assistant to be paid for your work. Tasks are ridiculous in nature as well. For example, call 20 different companies and jump through all of these hoops and get $3. If it takes more than 20 minutes you can message a manager to get the task split into a larger task which bumps up the price a little, but not much. It’s basically a sweatshop. All of the negative reviews are spot on.”

Updated 3/1/2023