Connects per proposal

The job post states what a proposal will cost to submit, and that figure "can change during the time the job is posted". It is not the cost of the proposal. A boost adds a bid on top, which may be charged at the close of the auction or returned; a job cancelled before a hire returns the base Connects; a job that expires or rejects you returns nothing. Add the first-boost bonus Connects, the activity rewards Upwork is testing and the weekly deductions for the Availability badge, and the balance on the Connects page is the sum of a month of events that each belong to a different proposal.

Upwork publishes no average cost per proposal, and the "connects cost 2026" posts that try to supply one contradict each other because they start from the posted number. The only way to know is to match every line of the Connects history to the proposal that caused it and net the lines.

That is what a ledger is for. Per proposal, the real cost is base plus held boost minus refunds; per member, per campaign and per keyword, it is the average of those, with the boost share shown separately so a campaign that boosts heavily is not read as expensive bidding. Divided into replies, it becomes the cost of a conversation, which is the number a price per lead should be compared with.

How Upsight uses it. Upsight reads the Connects history from a login with finance access, reconciles each charge and refund to its proposal, and reports Connects per proposal and Connects per reply in the ledger and the daily digest; a top-up whose balance read failed is recorded at the amount requested, never at zero, so the series does not inflate the price of a Connect.