How Lancer works

Lancer generates leads on Upwork by finding the right jobs, deciding which ones are worth your connects, writing the proposals, and submitting them from your own Upwork account. This page explains that pipeline once, at a high level, so the rest of the docs make sense.

The pipeline, step by step

1. Campaigns find jobs

A campaign is a targeting strategy: search queries and filters (keywords, budget floors, client history, payment verification, regions, and more) that continuously scan new Upwork job posts. Every job that matches becomes a lead in the campaign's feed. Jobs that do not match are never seen again, which makes filters your volume control.

2. The suitability AI decides

Matching a filter is not the same as being worth a proposal. Each lead is scored by Lancer's suitability AI, which reads your knowledge base and returns a plain yes or no per job.

The knowledge base is a profile you author (or let an MCP agent draft for you) describing what you actually do: core services, tools and technologies, projects you avoid, languages, case studies. It is the single biggest lever over which jobs get through. A vague knowledge base lets bad jobs through; an overly narrow one starves the campaign.

Rejected leads are kept with the AI's reasoning, so you can audit its decisions and tune the knowledge base until you agree with them.

3. The proposal is generated

For each suitable job, Lancer's proposal AI writes the cover letter and answers the job's screening questions. It composes three things you control:

• Your cover letter template. Literal text is kept word for word, and anything wrapped in double curly braces is a per-job instruction, for example {{mention the most relevant case study from the knowledge base}}.
• Your question rules, reusable answers for screening questions that follow the same convention.
• Your knowledge base, which gives the AI the facts it is allowed to use.

This is why the proposals sound like you: the AI fills in job-specific blanks inside copy you wrote, rather than writing freely.

4. Submission through your account

Proposals are submitted on Upwork through your connected Upwork account (called a bidder account in Lancer), applying the campaign's bidding settings: hourly rate strategy, connects budget, and optional boosting. Each campaign binds to exactly one bidder account.

5. Tracking and pipeline

Lancer tracks each proposal's lifecycle: contacted, opened, replied, rejected, plus connect spend. When a client replies, the conversation appears in your inbox, and the lead enters your pipeline, a CRM board with stages, deal values, notes, tasks, and meeting scheduling.

Where the developer surfaces plug in

• The MCP server lets an AI agent configure and operate everything above: draft the knowledge base, create campaigns, simulate suitability decisions on real jobs before going live, write templates, and manage the inbox and pipeline.
• External mode replaces steps 2 and 3 for a campaign. Lancer still finds the jobs (step 1) and still submits and tracks (steps 4 and 5), but the deciding and writing move to your own system via webhooks and the API.

Concepts cheat sheet