What Is Toptal and How Do You Apply? Is It Worth the Effort

Someone in a freelancer Discord I'm part of posted a screenshot: "Just got into Toptal, top 3%!" with about forty fire emoji reactions underneath.

I'd heard of Toptal before but never looked closely. That post made me curious enough to actually check the application page. Within an hour, I'd submitted my profile and portfolio links.

What followed was nothing like I expected.

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What Toptal actually is

Toptal isn't a marketplace where you create a profile and start bidding on jobs. There's no public-facing gig page. Instead, you go through a screening process first, and only after passing do you become part of their freelancer network that gets matched with clients.

The pitch to clients is straightforward: companies get freelancers who are already vetted, so they skip the screening work themselves. That's why larger companies and funded startups tend to use it, they're paying partly for that pre-filtering.

For freelancers, though, this means the entry barrier sits in a completely different place than platforms like Upwork or Fiverr.

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The screening process, stage by stage

The first stage was a language and personality interview, basically a video call to assess communication skills and working style. This part felt fairly normal, similar to a regular job interview.

The second stage was where things got noticeably harder. For my category (writing and basic web work), this meant submitting writing samples and then completing a timed test, a live writing task with a strict deadline.

This is where I started to feel the gap between "I'm a working freelancer" and "I'm prepared for this specific test." The topic given was outside my usual comfort zone, the timer was running, and I submitted something I wasn't confident about.

The wait afterward was longer than I expected, almost four weeks before I heard back. The email said I hadn't passed this stage.

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How I felt about the rejection

Honestly, a little deflated at first. But then I thought about it differently: this process is designed so that most people don't make it through. That's the entire premise of "top 3%," if everyone passed, the label would mean nothing.

What became clear to me is that Toptal isn't really aimed at people early in their freelancing journey. It seems built for freelancers who've already worked with demanding clients and have a portfolio that reflects that.

For someone like me, still building up client work through Upwork and direct outreach, Toptal feels less like "the next platform to try" and more like "a milestone for later."

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Would I try again?

There's a waiting period before reapplying, I'm not sure of the exact length but it's measured in months, not weeks. I decided to treat that time as portfolio-building time rather than just waiting around.

To be fair, there's something a little frustrating about the whole structure. You knock on a door, it closes, and you're told to come back later without much explanation of what specifically to improve. But flip that around, and it's also exactly why the label means something to clients in the first place. If it were easy to get through, it wouldn't be worth anything.

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Toptal versus where I actually am right now

I want to be careful here, because it's tempting to frame this as "Toptal is better" or "Toptal is harder, so skip it." Neither framing is quite right. Upwork and Fiverr have low entry barriers, high volume, and a wide spread of rates and client quality. Toptal has a high entry barrier, but the clients on the other side tend to run things in a more structured, professional way.

Both have a place depending on where you are. The honest answer for me right now is: not yet, but maybe later.

For now, my actual focus is on the clients I already have and slowly building out a portfolio that's more diverse than what I had when I first applied. Toptal stays on a list somewhere in the back of my mind, something to revisit in maybe 4-5 months, whether or not I feel "ready" by then. Honestly, I suspect that feeling of being ready might never fully arrive, and at some point you just try again anyway.