Pricing & coverage
Every cost, itemized — and what happens if something goes wrong
Most marketplaces call the whole thing a “platform fee” and take 15–30% out of the worker’s pay, then handle losses with fine print. The Town Works treats those as separate, visible things: what a job costs, and what backs you up if it goes wrong. Both are on this one page.
What it costs
A payment rail cost neither of us controls, an optional community reserve, and The Town Works’ own service fee — currently 6%, closer to a real-estate commission than a typical marketplace take rate, reviewed openly as real costs and scale become clearer, not a fixed ceiling we promise forever. See how that fee is stewarded.
None of this applies if you settle a job off-platform — cash, check, Venmo, bank transfer, whatever you and the other person agree on. You can still record the job at $0 through The Town Works so reviews, history, and milestones stay useful. See the relationship isn’t ours for the reasoning.
| Component | What it is | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Underlying work | Goes to the worker | — |
| Payment processing | Card ≈2.9% + $0.30 (bank transfer ≈0.8%, capped at $5, takes a few business days to clear) — $0 if paying from your TTW balance | external rail |
| Community reserve | Optional, ~1% (min $0.50) — supports locally governed assistance with small losses and disputes | opt-in |
| Catastrophic coverage | 0–1.5% by job risk class (min $0.25–$1) — opt-out allowed with attestation of your own coverage | opt-out |
| The Town Works operations | 6% of commerce, minimum $0.15 — none of this on cash or off-platform settlement | platform |
Registered as a provider? See the provider agreement for the one payout detail specific to receiving payments, not paying for them.
Every job you complete can add to a TTW balance instead of a bank transfer — spend it fee-free on another job, or move it to a real payout anytime. See your funds. New accounts also need a one-time admin approval before real payments go live, either direction — part of a careful, staged rollout, not a permanent step.
Try it
Change the amount, payment method, risk class, and coverage choices to see exactly how a job’s cost stacks up — and how much of it reaches the worker directly.
9.26% of what the buyer pays goes to rails, the reserve, coverage, and The Town Works combined — the rest reaches the worker directly.
- The worker receives
- $100.00
- Card processing
- $3.20
- Community reserve
- $1.00
- The Town Works operating cost
- $6.00
The fee constitution
Fees will remain as low as reasonably practical while supporting a durable, well-maintained service, and material changes will be explained publicly.
We’re not promising a permanent ceiling on the number — we don’t yet know what insurance, fraud prevention, compliance, or support at real scale will actually cost. What’s promised is the review: fees get periodically reevaluated against sustainability, accessibility, operating cost, volume, and community benefit, and the reasoning gets published when they change. Members vote on how the operating charge gets spent — see governance for what it does and doesn’t fund, and how that vote works.
Two different problems, two different tools
Routine failures — nonpayment, a broken lamp, a spoiled order — are common and small. Catastrophic ones — a serious injury, a fire — are rare but can be enormous. A community reserve is well-suited to the first. It is not, on its own, well-suited to the second. The Town Works treats them as separate layers rather than pretending one mechanism covers both.
Both layers only ever apply to a job paid through The Town Works (card or bank transfer). A job settled off-platform — cash, check, Venmo, whatever you and the other person agree on — isn’t covered by either one, and isn’t something The Town Works can resolve a dispute over; see the relationship isn’t ours for why that trade-off exists on purpose.
Layer 0 — you
first $25A small deductible stays with the two people involved. It cuts out the huge volume of nuisance claims that cost more to process than they're worth.
Layer 1 — community reserve
$25–$500Nonpayment, minor accidental damage, a spoiled order, a no-show. Fast, human-reviewed, funded by the opt-in ~1% contribution. The Town Works already has the evidence — the agreement, payment, messages, and completion record — so even a $75 dispute is cheap to resolve fairly.
Layer 2 — catastrophic coverageComing soon
above $500Serious injury, fire, major property loss — losses that could overwhelm a neighborhood-sized reserve on their own. This is meant to be real third-party insurance through a licensed carrier or program administrator, not something The Town Works underwrites itself. Until that carrier relationship exists, carry your own insurance for any work with real risk — see below.
Risk classes
A cleaning job and a roofing job don’t carry the same risk, so they don’t carry the same catastrophic-coverage charge. Every job gets a risk class when it’s proposed:
Low exposure
tutoring, organizing, design work, remote help
no premium — coverage usually isn't warranted
Ordinary exposure
cleaning, gardening, food, basic handyman, beauty services
a modest per-transaction charge
High exposure
ladders, roofing, electrical, tree work, transport, childcare
priced higher; may need added requirements over time
Opting out is discouraged
Catastrophic coverage is included by default on any job above the lowest risk class. A provider can opt out, but only by attesting — in their own words, on the record — that they already carry equivalent coverage. We’d rather someone with their own general liability policy not pay for a second one; we don’t want anyone opting out just to save a dollar and hoping nothing goes wrong.
What the reserve isn’t, yet
We deliberately avoid calling the community reserve “insurance.” A defined promise to compensate specific losses in exchange for contributions can trigger insurance regulation, and we intend to get that structure right — with actual counsel — before we describe it that way. Today it’s a community-governed discretionary reserve: assistance is reviewed against published guidelines, never guaranteed.
What catastrophic coverage isn’t, yet
The charge and the risk-class mechanism above are real and calculated — but there is no licensed insurance carrier behind them yet. Until that partnership exists, this layer doesn’t transfer any actual risk. We’re building the mechanism first so it’s ready the day a real underwriter is in place, not promising coverage that isn’t there.
If your work carries real risk today — ladders, roofing, transport, childcare, anything above low exposure — carry your own general liability coverage in the meantime. That’s not a workaround, it’s the actual recommendation until a real carrier is in place. Vote for this on the roadmap.
Full transparency, always
Every local reserve publishes its own balance, contributions, and claims paid. See Oakland's reserve as a working example. Money contributed by the community is held for the community — reviewed by people, not an algorithm — and if a reserve grows well past what it needs, the contribution rate comes down, not stays high because it can.