Short answer
The Send Proposal page (in the left menu) lets you apply to any Upwork job yourself, including one your campaigns skipped or never saw. Paste the job link and Lancer finds the job, checks that no campaign is already handling it, rates the fit, writes the cover letter and screening answers, and shows it all to you. Nothing goes out until you press Send now or Schedule.
How to send a proposal
Open Send Proposal in the left menu.
Paste the Upwork job link (it contains "~02"). Under Send as, check which Upwork account, knowledge base and cover letter template to use, and click Change to switch them. If you connected an agency account you can also pick the agency and the contractor. Lancer remembers your choice for next time.
Start it. Lancer runs four steps and shows each one as it goes:
Find the job: reads it from Lancer’s job feed, or opens it on Upwork if it is not in the feed yet. Fetching live can take a while.
Check it isn’t already handled: looks through your campaigns for this job. If a campaign already sent it or is submitting it right now, Lancer stops there, because it has been applied to. If a campaign has it queued or is working on it, you choose Send it myself instead or Let <campaign> send it. If a campaign looked at it and decided not to send, that is shown to you.
Check the fit: compares the job with your knowledge base and shows Good fit or Below your bar (suitable from 80), with the reason. If it is below your bar you can click Write the proposal anyway or Skip this job.
Write the cover letter: uses your template and also answers the screening questions.
Review and send (your turn): edit anything below, then send.
What you can edit before sending
Cover letter and Screening answers: change the text directly. Your edits are saved as you go.
Attachments: upload files, or reuse files you already attached to a campaign.
Bid settings: turn Boost on or off and set Max boost (in connects, at least 1), and choose the hourly rate: My profile rate or A fixed rate.
Send now or schedule
Send now submits the proposal on Upwork. It takes a minute or two and you can leave the page.
Schedule sends it in 15 minutes, 1 hour or 3 hours (pick from the dropdown next to it).
Until it starts submitting, Cancel send stops it.
When it works you see Proposal sent on Upwork, and it shows in your dashboard and inbox like any other proposal.
If a send fails
A temporary problem on Upwork's side (for example Upwork's security check or a rate limit): Lancer tries again by itself, about 3, 10, 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes after the first failure. While it waits, the bar shows Sending at <time> for the next try, and you can still Cancel send, edit and send again.
A problem on Lancer's side: the send waits (up to 12 hours) until our engineers have fixed it, then tries again.
Before each retry Lancer checks the job again. If the client has hired, is already interviewing, or the job has closed, the retry is skipped so you don't spend connects on a proposal that would land too late.
Something only you can fix (for example a wrong password or no connects), or retries that never get through: the bar tells you why, and you can fix it and send again.
Find what you sent
Above the table, a stats strip shows how your hand-sent proposals have done, all time: Sent, Viewed, Replied and Won (each with its count and its share of the proposals sent) and Cost / lead. It appears once you have sent at least one proposal from the page. The same numbers show on the Dashboard as the light-blue Manually Sent Proposals row under your campaigns in Breakdowns, but there they follow the dashboard period.
The Sent from here table under the form lists every job sent from the page, newest first, with its live Upwork status, when it went out and the boost. Click Open to put a job back into the form. In Dashboard → Recent Leads, pick Manually sent proposals (from Lancer) in the campaign dropdown to see only these. Jobs you pasted but never sent can also appear in these lists; their status shows a grey Not sent chip.
Send from Claude, ChatGPT or another AI agent
Connect the Lancer MCP (Settings → Integrations → MCP) and tell your AI tool "send a proposal for this job" with the link. It uses the same checks as this page, shows you the letter, answers, boost and attachments, and asks before it sends. It can also cancel a scheduled send and check whether a proposal was sent or failed. More on the MCP in "API, MCP, webhooks & integrations overview".
Good to know
It is the same bidding Lancer does for campaigns, so the usual rules still apply: your Upwork account must be connected and your subscription active. See "Why didn’t my bid send?" if a send fails.
If you keep sending the same kind of job by hand, update your Knowledge Base or campaign filters so Lancer picks those up automatically.