You placed a bid, then noticed the client has a 2.1 rating and a string of disputed projects. Or you priced it wrong. Or the brief changed in the comments and the job's no longer what you bid on. Natural reaction: pull the bid back. But a freelancer.com retract bid doesn't work the way most freelancers assume, and the credit math is the part that bites. Retracting isn't free, and it isn't reversible in the way you'd hope.
We get this question more than almost any other in support, phrased a dozen ways: a user retracts a bid, then asks why the credit didn't come back. The answer surprises people every time.
Yes, you can retract, but the credit is gone
You can pull a bid back any time before the project's awarded to you. The mechanics are simple. Go to the project page, find your proposal in the bid list, and click Retract. Or from My Projects in Freelancer View, open the Active Bids tab and select Retract Bid under the project's Action dropdown (Freelancer.com: how to retract a bid).
Here's the catch that matters. The retracted bid does not add back to your bid count. Freelancer.com is explicit: "If you have 7/8 bids before retracting, you will still have 7/8 bids after" (Freelancer.com: how to retract a bid). The credit's spent. Retracting removes your proposal from the client's view, but it doesn't refund the thing you paid to place it.
And if you bought an upgrade, that's gone too. Any bid upgrade you purchased "will not be refunded to your account when you retract a bid" (Freelancer.com: how to retract a bid). Seal it, sponsor it, then retract it, and you've burned the upgrade fee for nothing.
So retracting isn't an undo button. It's a hide button that costs you the credit you already spent.
What retracting actually buys you
If the credit's gone either way, why retract at all? Because retraction does one real thing: it removes you from consideration. Once you confirm, "the employer will no longer be able to see your bid or award you the project" (Freelancer.com: how to retract a bid).
That's worth something in exactly one situation: when being awarded the project would be bad for you. A client you've decided you don't want to work with. A project whose scope ballooned in the comments. A brief that turned out to be a scam pattern. In those cases, retracting protects you from winning something you'd have to decline or, worse, deliver badly.
Outside that, retracting to "save face" or "clean up" your active bids is pure waste. The credit's already spent. Leaving a bid live costs you nothing extra, and you might still win.
Here's the opinion we'll defend: most retractions are a mistake driven by impatience. Freelancers retract bids that went quiet, assuming the project's dead, then the client surfaces a week later and awards someone still in the list. A quiet bid isn't a lost bid. Unless the project is actively bad for you, leaving it live is almost always the right call.
You can re-bid, which changes the calculus
One detail softens the credit sting. If you retract and change your mind, "you can bid on the project again as long as it is still open and you still have available bids" (Freelancer.com: how to retract a bid).
That costs a second credit, obviously. But it means retraction isn't a permanent exit from a project, just an expensive round trip. Useful to know if you retracted in haste and the project turns out fine after all.
The practical read: never retract a bid you might want back, because getting it back costs another credit. Retract only when you're sure you want out, period.
Editing a bid is the better move more often than you'd think
Retracting is the blunt tool. Editing is the precise one, and freelancers reach for it far too rarely.
You can change your bid amount after placing it. If you and the client agreed on new terms, you can even edit the amount after the project's been awarded to you, which Freelancer.com documents in its "Changing the bid amount" and "Editing bids" support articles (Freelancer.com project support). For an in-progress fixed-price project, you go to the Proposals page and click Request Edit, where you can change the bid amount and proposed delivery duration.
Two hard limits to know. You can only send a bid change request once, and editing is available on fixed-price projects only (Freelancer.com: editing a bid in an in-progress project). The platform's own guidance is to discuss the change with the client in chat and reach agreement before sending the request, because you don't get a second one.
This is the move for a mispriced bid. Instead of retracting (credit gone) and re-bidding (another credit) to fix a price, you edit, once, for free. The credit math alone makes editing the default fix for anything short of needing out of the project entirely.
A decision table for stuck bids
When a bid isn't sitting right, run the situation through this before you touch anything.
| Situation | Best move | Credit cost |
|---|---|---|
| Priced it wrong, still want the job | Request Edit (discuss first, one shot) | Free |
| Client looks risky / scope ballooned | Retract | Credit already spent, no refund |
| Bid went quiet, project still open | Leave it live | Nothing extra |
| Won the award, agreed new terms | Edit amount after award | Free |
| Retracted by mistake, project still open | Re-bid | New credit |
| Bought a seal/sponsor, now want out | Retract, but accept the upgrade is gone | Credit + upgrade lost |
The pattern reading down that table is clear. Editing is free and fixes most problems. Retracting always costs you the credit you spent and any upgrade on top. Leaving a bid alone costs nothing. The expensive mistakes all live in the "acted too fast" rows.
A real workflow example
Picture a web developer who bids $800 on a WordPress migration, then realizes from a clarification answer that the site's ten times bigger than the brief suggested. $800 is now way too low.
The impatient move: retract the bid (credit gone), then place a new bid at $1,800 (second credit gone). Two credits spent to fix one number.
The right move: message the client. "Based on your answer about the database size, this is a larger job than the brief described. Can we align on revised scope before the bid gets updated?" They agree on $1,700. The developer uses Request Edit once, updates the amount, and keeps both credits. Same outcome, half the cost, and the client saw a freelancer who scopes carefully instead of one who flip-flops on price.
That's the difference between knowing the tools and reaching for the loudest one. Retract felt like the obvious fix. Edit was the smart one.
Why this matters more at volume
If you're placing a handful of bids a month, a wasted credit here and there is annoying but survivable. At volume, the credit economics compound fast.
Across the accounts running FreelancerAutoBid, we see roughly 312 projects per active user per month flowing through the auto-bidder, and credits are the scarce resource the whole system optimizes around. A freelancer who reflexively retracts quiet bids is quietly setting fire to credits that could've stayed live and occasionally won. We watched this in early bid logs: users who retracted aggressively had measurably lower wins per credit than users who let bids ride, because retracted bids have a zero percent chance of winning and live ones don't.
This is part of why we built FreelancerAutoBid's screening to be strict before the bid goes out, not after. The cheapest retraction is the bid you never place on a bad-fit project. Screen hard up front, and you rarely face the retract-or-leave decision at all, because the bids that go out are ones you actually want live. The features page covers how project screening filters bad-fit work before a credit's spent.
One honest note. None of this changes Freelancer.com's terms on automated access (§33). Knowing the retract and edit rules cold is about not wasting credits, which is good practice whether a bid was placed by hand or not.
Retracting a bid hides it but never refunds the credit, so reach for the edit tool first and retract only when winning would genuinely hurt you. To see how strict project screening keeps credits from going to bad-fit projects in the first place, walk through how FreelancerAutoBid bids or explore the features page.