Approval mode

On Upwork a proposal is sent when a freelancer, or a business manager acting for an agency member, submits the form with a cover letter, terms and the answers to any screening questions, and the Connects are charged at that moment. Upwork's own AI, Uma, drafts and the person submits. Approval mode keeps that shape with the drafting done by the bidder.

With approval on, a campaign behaves like a very fast colleague. It watches the feed, scores and skips most jobs, writes the letter from the agency's knowledge base, picks the member, sizes the boost, and then stops: the draft appears in the queue with the job, the score and the reasons, and a person approves it, edits it or rejects it. Rejected drafts cost nothing and are not metered.

With approval off, which is auto mode, the same draft is scheduled to send after the workspace's review window, which is seconds long unless changed, and anyone with access can edit or stop it before then. Drafts are still held, not sent, when they have no bid, fall outside the campaign's schedule or would pass a daily cap.

Why turn it on: spray hurts reply rate before it hurts an account, and a person reading drafts is the fastest way to find a campaign whose keyword, budget floor or voice is wrong before it has spent a month of Connects. It suits a new campaign, or one that has just changed.

How Upsight uses it. The switch sits on each campaign as "A person approves every proposal". Late-bid campaigns start with it on, and a job added to a campaign by hand always waits for a person whatever the setting. A dry run shows what a campaign would send before anything is filed.