Manchester is the best UK city for Freelancers

A thriving Freelance community is vital for the sustainability of a tech ecosystem. It allows tech companies to easily source talent for short-term projects without being burdened by heavy recruitment costs.

I came to know the freelancer community of Manchester through Andrew Disley due to his efforts in bringing the community through GeekUp Events in mid 2000s. As a follow up to GeekUp, Andrew created Need where companies can find Freelancers easily, vice versa.

According to MoneySupermarket.com, Great Britain has a population of 1.4 million Freelancers with Manchester being the best location to be a Freelancer.

Other local efforts in bringing the community together includes:

• Twine founded by Stuart Logan which claims to have over 220,000 creative Freelancers.
• CGHero co-founded by Jonathan Lloyd focusing on customer 2D and 3D computer graphics with the community capped at 1000 to retain the best quality Freelancers.
• Wooshii founded by Fergus Dyer-Smith had a similar start to Twine, but has pivoted after it was acquired by GetUpdated in 2011. Today, it has evolved to become a video production platform with a strong network of creatives.

Following analysis is provided by MoneySupermarket.com