Pros
There is nothing positive about this company unless being bullied by managers and making $1.25 per hour is your dream.
Cons
I'm a professional transcriptionist, and this is single-handedly the worst company I have ever worked with. The pay is illegally low (and I mean it truly is actually against the law). They advertise $15 per audio hour. The industry standard for transcription time is 4x the length of audio, i.e. a 1-min audio clip will take a professional 4 mins to transcribe accurately. That means their advertised pay rate is $3.75 per hour. And I'm sure this brings some people in, because "Hey, it's lower than minimum wage was in 1975 but at least I can work whenever I want, right?" No, you can't. There are very few jobs available, no matter how many "teams" you're on. I'm on 5 teams, including being a 2-step QA (which advertises the second-to-highest pay rate at a whopping $23 per audio hour), and most days since I've started contracting here, I've only been able to get maybe 15-30 minutes of actual audio in a day. You basically have to be sat in front of your computer logged on all day -- like 10-12 hours, to even get that much. As a QA, you have access to longer files, but the audio and first-draft transcription are so bad that those end up taking me generally 5-6x longer, making my pay for them even less. But how can I blame the other transcriptionists for that when the audio of every single file TranscribeMe accepts is so poor and who are literally making pennies for transcribing it? Even after several months and moving up to join multiple teams, I never cleared more than $60 a week, sitting more than 9 hours at the computer every single day, just waiting for work. If you count the time spent sitting in front of your computer, let's say a minimum of 8 hours, waiting for jobs, you're literally making $1.25 per hour. Still worth it? And this is not counting the additional hours upon hours of "study" time to learn their guidelines, study for the "advancement" tests, and then actually taking the tests (which generally take 3-4 hours each, and require multiple attempts because you don't get feedback on what you do wrong and all of their test study guides and style guides are out of date). I know people are still going to apply because it's home-based and requires zero experience (which really shows in the quality of transcription they produce), and because people are desperate. This company exists to take advantage of desperate people. Don't do it. Google transcription jobs and submit a sample to any of the literally thousands of other freelance transcription services that exist. Even the lowest of other independent companies START their rates at $42 per audio hour. That's standard in the industry. If the pay weren't bad enough, then there's their training, which consists of outdated PDF guides that don't match their unsearchable database online. But to top it off, there's the attitude and treatment from the managers. The ones I've had dealings with are the most condescending bullies I've ever worked with. Here's what I've seen in my feed in the last week: a mod ridiculed an employee for having the gall to ask a question that gasp! had been asked before, 13 months ago. A mod bullied an employee who pointed out that what was in the style guide was not what was being followed in practice, saying he should have been able to figure that out himself and he was a time-waster for asking anything. An employee asked how much a QA made in a week, and a mod acted as if that question was so inappropriate it couldn't even be answered, even after multiple other employees expressed interest in the answer as well. An employee asked how long it took others to pass a certain exam; a mod jumped in and told the employee he shouldn't be asking, he shouldn't even be taking the exam (that's open to everyone), and that he wasn't following protocol. Simply for asking a question to other employees! An employee pointed out an inconsistency in a process that seemed unfair, and he was banned before the end of the day. When another employee questioned what had happened, they were banned too. It appears that anyone who pushes back the tiniest bit is banned from TranscribeMe immediately. Just scrolling through the feed from the last six months is hilarious because fully 40% of the users from that time period have been banned. It just baffles me how this company exists. If making $1.25 per hour, tolerating public abuse from your manager, and risking getting banned for arbitrary and unfair reasons (and if you get banned before you've withdrawn your money, well, say goodbye to that money! They are literally stealing money from employees) sounds good, then by all means, try out TranscribeMe. Or, read the reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed, the complaints on the Better Business Bureau, and very soon a California labor law violation suit as their pay doesn't meet the minimum for CA (or anywhere in the US) and their employees should actually be legally classified as employees and not contractors, and find yourself another transcription company. This place is not worth it. Not worth it by a mile.