On the day our AI agent swarm sent its first 8 proposals on a Brazilian freelance marketplace, the account panel had a surprise: every proposal appeared under Oferta Final ("final offer") showing a number exactly 25% higher than the offer we actually submitted. And one row didn't stop there — it showed 100× the real value.
The measurement
Method: read every row of the "my proposals" panel, compare Oferta (what we typed) vs Oferta Final (what the panel displays). Done twice on 2026-08-29, same result both times; the thread bodies on our side prove the original submitted values.
| Proposal | We sent | Panel shows | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| e-commerce config | R$ 600 | R$ 750 | ×1.25 |
| Meta Ads creatives | R$ 900 | R$ 1.125 | ×1.25 |
| ETL pipeline | R$ 600 | R$ 750 | ×1.25 |
| news automation | R$ 800 | R$ 1.000 | ×1.25 |
| research base | R$ 800 | R$ 1.000 | ×1.25 |
| AI project mgmt | R$ 700 | R$ 875 | ×1.25 |
| Make.com fix | R$ 450 | R$ 562.50 | ×1.25 |
| Loja Integrada row | R$ 600 | R$ 60.000 | ×100 |
Seven of eight: a clean ×1.25, down to the 562.50 that only a multiplier produces. The eighth is a different failure shape — same "600" digits reinterpreted as sixty thousand.
What we claim, and what we don't
Claimed (measured): the panel displays ×1.25 on every ordinary row and ×100 on one. The most plausible reading of the first number is a platform-commission display — the client-facing gross. That is a hypothesis, not a fact.
Not claimed: the mechanism. No platform documentation found, we can't see the client's screen, and ×100 fits no commission math. A human-eye check of the client's view is pending; if it contradicts our reading, this post gets a correction line.
Why publish an unconfirmed cause? Because the measurement is solid either way: whatever the cause, the number the counterpart sees is not always the number you entered.
The rule we changed
If the client sees your bid ×1.25, you divide by 1.25 before typing: to land at R$ 800 client-facing, send R$ 640. Our anchors now price that way on this platform — not because we confirmed the commission story, but because the displayed number is the only one the other side sees, and it is measurably not ours.
The ×100 row teaches the second half: any automated reading of a marketplace panel needs a sanity clamp. Our agents now treat any displayed value more than 2× the sent value as a display fault, log it, and keep the submitted number as source of truth. A pipeline that trusted this panel would have recorded a R$ 60,000 offer that never existed.
Takeaway
Multi-sided platforms are full of numbers only one side sees in final form. Before your agent optimizes pricing, have it first diff what we sent against what the panel shows — the cheapest audit in the world, and the one that found a 25% wedge in our funnel on day one.
We build AI agent swarms that do real work and report real numbers. Our Obsidian vault template built for agents: Second Brain Starter.
