The multi-award winning site works like an online auction for outsourced work. You simply post the job you want doing and watch as over 2million professionals from 234 countries bid to win your business. It has proved such a success that the site has just passed $100m worth of outsourced jobs around the world.

Freelancer.com offers enormous savings because most of the professionals tend to come from developing countries such as India, Pakistan and the Phillipines, where people are prepared to work for far less than local Australian businesses.

But you do not sacrifice anything in terms of quality. Not only are the workers highly skilled, but you do not have to pay any money until you are completely satisfied with the work that has been done.

“This is all about empowering local businesses and entrepreneurs who have all these great ideas but every time they look for local people to do the work for them and make them a reality, they are knocked back by these enormous quotes for thousands of dollars” said Matt Barrie, founder of Freelancer.com.

“This is not only a major hassle it’s also an enormous waste of time. But with our service you can simply post the job and wait for the offers to come in – usually for a tiny fraction of the price you could get in Australia. Not only are we seeing typical savings of 80-90%, but with the strong dollar, businesses are getting even more bang for their buck.”

Once you post your job and have selected a freelancer to do the work, you deposit money into a freelancer.com account but do not have to release any funds until you have seen the work and approved it. Only then do you have to part with any cash.

Over half of all jobs are posted from US employers, followed by the UK, Canada and now Australia, as awareness slowly grows about the savings that are available.

The most common types of work are typically website design or smartphone/ipad apps. But other work such as property design, manufacturing and skilled craftsmanship are also growing in popularity.

“There is really nothing that can’t be outsourced” said Barrie. “We are constantly surprised by the variety of jobs that are posted and the number of people offering to do the work.”

Barrie himself is a genuine Australian success story, having graduated from Stanford University at the same time as the founders of Yahoo and PayPal. He saw the first algorithm that underpins the PayPal model and now teaches IT entrepreneurship at Sydney University.