Herald

If you freelance on Upwork^TM, you've probably felt this. You search for jobs, find something that looks like a genuine fit, and notice it was posted several hours ago with 30 or 40 proposals already in. You write something thoughtful anyway. Nothing comes back.

Paying attention to my own hit rate, a pattern appears: proposals submitted early in a job's life tend to do better. Clients see fewer proposals, they're still engaged, and the competition hasn't piled in yet. Whether that's 20 minutes or a few hours depends on the category and how popular the listing is.

This isn't a groundbreaking insight. Most experienced Upwork^TM freelancers already know it. The problem is that acting on it requires either checking the platform constantly, or having something tell you when relevant jobs appear. And the tools for that second option are surprisingly limited.

What Upwork^TM actually offers

Upwork^TM has a Freelancer Plus subscription (around $19/month) that includes job alerts. But when you dig into how it works, it's not quite what you'd expect. The alerts are based on jobs similar to ones you've previously applied to — not filters you set yourself. You can't say "notify me about fixed-price UX design jobs over $500 from clients with a verified payment method." The system infers what you might want from your history, which sounds clever but in practice feels imprecise and hard to control.

There are a handful of third-party tools that monitor Upwork^TM, and some work reasonably well. Most come in at €15-20 per month and require creating an account. Several have also moved toward AI-assisted proposal writing — a useful feature, but one that most freelancers already cover with their own preferred tools. Herald takes a different approach. Rather than trying to do everything, we focused on getting you in front of the right jobs, faster. Your filters, your search terms, your space — no noise, no bloat. This focus also means we can keep costs significantly lower, which is reflected directly in Herald's pricing. AI is on our radar too, with resume-to-job matching being something we're exploring for a future release, to help you better target the opportunities worth pursuing. But for now, Herald is built around the belief that the best proposal tool you have is already knowing about the job before everyone else does.

Why Google Chat^TM

The obvious approach would be a standalone app or a browser extension. But both fall short in practice. A browser extension is tied to your desktop — the moment you step away from your computer, you're out of the loop. A standalone app solves the mobile problem, but it adds yet another installation to your device, and you'd still need to jump back into Upwork^TM to actually apply. It solves half the problem while creating a new one.
Freelancing isn't just about doing the work — it's also about organizing it. Proposals, contracts, invoices, schedules, client communication. For most freelancers, Google^TM's suite handles all of this naturally. It's fast, shareable, and leads its category — which means most people are already familiar with Google Docs^TM, Google Sheets^TM, Google Calendar^TM, Gmail^TM, and Google Chat^TM. It's not a tool they had to learn; it's already part of how they work.
Google Chat^TM was the obvious answer. It works seamlessly in the browser and on mobile, requires no additional installation, and comes at no extra cost. Herald lives right inside it — so whether you're at your desk or on the go, your job alerts are always with you.
Google Chat^TM has a relatively low profile compared to Slack, but it comes included with any Google^TM account. A lot of freelancers already have it open, or at least have an account that's just sitting there.
It also means setup is straightforward. You install Herald from the Google Workspace Marketplace^TM, add it to a Google Chat^TM space, and run /filters to configure your filters. That's the whole setup process. No account creation, no onboarding flow, no additional passwords.

How Herald works

Herald monitors Upwork continuously and pushes a notification to your Googlle Chat^TM space when a listing matches your filters. In most cases that means within a few minutes of the job being posted — though I won't pretend it's perfectly instant, and network conditions can vary.

The filtering is where most of the thought went. You can define alerts by: Category, Skills, Search terms, Experience level, Contract type, Fixed contract value Hourly contract rate, Job duration, Payment status, Client rating

The intent is that you spend a few minutes with /filters defining exactly the kind of work you're looking for, and from that point Herald runs quietly in the background.

The commands you'll use day-to-day are simple:

• /filters Configure your filters. This is where you tell Herald what to look for. Alerts won't start until you've saved your settings at least once.
• /snooze Pause notifications temporarily. Set a date and time to resume, and choose whether Herald should catch you up on anything posted while you were away, or just start fresh.
• /license Manage your subscription and activate your license code.
• /help A reference card covering all commands, with links to support if you need them.

One feature worth mentioning: you can add Herald to multiple Google Chat^TM spaces, each with completely independent filter settings. So if you work across di!erent skill sets — say, web development and technical writing — you can have a separate alert channel for each, without the two getting mixed together.

What Herald doesn't do

A few things worth being explicit about. Herald notifies you about jobs — it doesn't apply to them for you, evaluate them, or tell you which ones to prioritise. That part is still entirely on you.

It also only works inside Google Chat^TM. If you're primarily a Slack user, Herald won't be useful to you right now (though Slack integration is on the roadmap — more on that below).

And while the filters cover the most common criteria, they don't cover everything Upwork^TM surfaces. There are edge cases the current version doesn't handle yet. That's something I'm actively working on, and the feedback form at the end of the trial is partly designed to surface exactly these kinds of gaps.

Pricing

Herald is free to install. Keeping alerts running requires a subscription.

I set the price deliberately below the alternatives. The goal is that it pays for itself quickly — one project picked up because you applied before the queue built up is typically more than enough. But that's for you to judge based on how you actually use it.

Try it, and tell me what you think

Herald is free to install and comes with a trial period. Install it from the Marketplace, add it to a Google Chat^TM space, set your filters, and see if the alerts are useful. If the timing works out and you find yourself applying to jobs you'd have otherwise missed, the Herald Monitoring Service has done its job.

FEEDBACK PRIZE DRAW

Win a free year of Herald

After the trial period you will receive a short Google Form^TM asking for honest feedback — what worked, what didn't, what's missing. From everyone who responds,On June 1^st 2026, I'll randomly draw 10 email addresses and give each of them a full year of the Herald Monitoring Service at no cost. The feedback is genuinely useful for deciding what to build next. The free year is a thank you for the time it takes to fill it out.

What's next

A few things I'm thinking about for future versions. These aren't firm commitments — they depend on how the early feedback goes and where actual demand sits:

• Daily email digest — a morning summary of filtered jobs for people who prefer not to have real-time pings running all day.
• Job market reports — aggregated data on Upwork trends: which categories are growing, hire rates, rate benchmarks. Useful context for positioning yourself.
• Other platforms integration— Herald for people who live in other places rather than Google Chat^TM>.

The feedback form will include questions about all three, so if any of these would actually change how you work, that's a good place to say so.

Heralld homepage INSTALL ON GOOGLE WORKSPACE ^TM

---