Yes, you set your own rate - but if you live in a larger western Europe/North America city, you will never be able to receive anything approaching the normal daily rate or salary that you could find locally.
For the (automated) tests - I've never had need to do anything like them at work in over 20 years of professional software development. Unsurprisingly to me, I utterly failed them - but told them I've that, and so went through anyway. Other parts of the testing were better - the 'live coding' (ie, having someone keep an eye on you as you wrote code on screen) was fun and relatively simple, but a lot more like reality of a day to day role.
The final step took me a full two weeks to learn a whole new framework for a 'single page application' - again, something that I do not specialise in at all, or have ever done before. They appeared to simply see it running, and that was the final pass to allow me to create a profile on the Toptal site.
Half the roles listed are still unfilled after a couple of weeks. I suspect that a number of them end up just wanting someone really cheap - but Toptal doesn't do cheap - not with a ~50% markup over the developer cost. I've had a number of jobs applied for simply never come back with any status and they eventually time out. Only very rarely do I recognise any company names for the new jobs they list - certainly none of the ones they promote that are their current clients show up.
So, if you are a NodeJS, Laravel, Rails, Wordpress, IOS, or Android developer - and don't expect to be paid well, compared to the 'top 3% in the world' - then it might be worthwhile taking a few weeks to apply. Otherwise, it will not pay what you're worth.
For the (automated) tests - I've never had need to do anything like them at work in over 20 years of professional software development. Unsurprisingly to me, I utterly failed them - but told them I've that, and so went through anyway. Other parts of the testing were better - the 'live coding' (ie, having someone keep an eye on you as you wrote code on screen) was fun and relatively simple, but a lot more like reality of a day to day role.
The final step took me a full two weeks to learn a whole new framework for a 'single page application' - again, something that I do not specialise in at all, or have ever done before. They appeared to simply see it running, and that was the final pass to allow me to create a profile on the Toptal site.
Half the roles listed are still unfilled after a couple of weeks. I suspect that a number of them end up just wanting someone really cheap - but Toptal doesn't do cheap - not with a ~50% markup over the developer cost. I've had a number of jobs applied for simply never come back with any status and they eventually time out. Only very rarely do I recognise any company names for the new jobs they list - certainly none of the ones they promote that are their current clients show up.
So, if you are a NodeJS, Laravel, Rails, Wordpress, IOS, or Android developer - and don't expect to be paid well, compared to the 'top 3% in the world' - then it might be worthwhile taking a few weeks to apply. Otherwise, it will not pay what you're worth.