Fiverr cuts 30% of staff in pivot to ‘AI-first’
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/16/fiverr_ai_layoff/
Fiverr cuts 30% of staff in pivot to ‘AI-first’
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/16/fiverr_ai_layoff/
19 Comments
“Freelance services marketplace Fiverr has told around 250 staffers that they are back on the market as it pivots to having “a modern, clean, AI-focused infrastructure from the ground up.”
The move shouldn’t really come as a surprise to employees; Kaufman gave fair warning. The founder sent out an email to staff in May saying that AI was coming for everyone’s jobs. He warned staff that they need to use AI to replace the mundane tasks of their jobs – wanting people to automate “100% of what they are doing.”
What??? The labour devaluation machine is devaluing labour more efficiently???
Yeah, this vibe coding trend where nobody reads a single line of code after giving AI an instruction set and just trusts the output after cursory testing…that’s totally not an extinction level event in the making.
Fiverr causes us to undersell our skills and services to chase pennies of the Fed’s overprinted Monopoly money.
Doesn’t surprise me the CEO exploits his own workers the same way.
Fiverr just needed the stock price to go up. And laid people off cause of it.
This just in, people continue not using Fiver.
More at Eleven, about how the dumbest ai ventures will be the first to drown when the bubble pops.
Now and then, I look at Fiverr to see what the going rate is for freelance work, then laugh.
With all those lay off, I’m pretty sure it’s an excuse.
It’s a cheat code “how to lay off but still look good on the market.”
if we didnt live under capitalism, ai would be a blessing. Sadly we do though, so we will end up with no money, no place to work and no free time, while a couple thousand people blast enough co2 in the air to kill us all.
– Fiverr peaks in 2021
– Fiverr stock plummets from $320 to $23 dollars
– CEO announces layoffs due to *checks notes for current trending technology *, AI, yes that’ll do.
A tale as old as time.
100% of what they are doing? Love using ai but it comes up with some stuff that is so insanely wrong, and when you tell the ai why it is wrong, for me it always ends up saying “sorry I apologize that answer can’t possibly be correct “
“Setup my company to be 100% AI automated before your termination date. Thank you.”
Who cares lmao, fiverr is literally just a website
more ai bs to justify poor hiring practices and to fuel the ai bs hype train,we ve seen it time and time again
I used to use Fiver and r/slavelabour for one offs to create formulas and macros to parse data in excel for my work. The $10-$15 bucks I paid to the people in Africa, Ukraine or India was well worth it. I paid it out of my own pocket and then was able to do more work as OT. Its something I did for years.
Then earlier this year I tried to do it in chatgpt. It took me a while to get the word prompts correct, but I was able to create a working macro that did exacty what I needed…for free.
Since then I have learned how to do it even better. I can have chatgpt create a macro in 30 minutes. My work has improved with the new direction I have taken on using it for more work related tasks. My bosses love it to.
My coders I used to use around the world are out of work because of AI.
I think people are reading this the way like Fiverr is saying AI is helping their business and the layoffs are because of cost savings they have identified. This is not it.
Fiverr definitely is threatened by AI. Not for a positive reason for them. It’s not that they are seeing efficiencies. It’s that people are using Fiverr less for a lot of shit. From coding to graphic design to translation to walking step by step through implementation of some complex software.
You just don’t need Fiverr freelancers to the same degree anymore. They laid people off because of an AI-caused drop in revenue.
Here I was thinking tech companies would all switch to 3-day work weeks thanks to AI, not lay 1/3 of their employees off. /s
Wait, they didn’t just keep everyone one but switch to four day work weeks? I’m totally shocked.
My recommendation would have been that when the founder of the company says AI is taking you job, quit that day. Don’t wait. Everyone quit.