Letting a stranger into your home is the hard part

A job on HomyZone has two gates, and you hold the key to each one.

The start PIN is how work begins. The professional cannot mark the job as started until you read it out. That confirms the right person reached the right address — and it means nobody can claim to have started a job they never attended. If someone arrives saying they are from HomyZone and cannot complete this step in their app, they are not your professional.

The completion PIN is how work ends. The job stays open until you have looked at the work and decided you are satisfied. Only then do you share the second PIN, and only then is the job closed. If you are paying in cash, that is the moment it changes hands.

Between those two gates, nothing about your job can move without you.

A professional has 90 minutes to reach your door, counted from when your job is due to start — the moment they accept, or your booked slot if that is later. Accepting a morning slot the night before costs them nothing.

An arrival promise with nothing behind it is marketing. This one has a consequence: if the window is missed it is recorded as a no-show against the professional — a penalty for them, never a charge for you — and you can cancel at no charge or ask to be matched with another professional in one tap, at no extra cost and at the same price. You are not left choosing between waiting indefinitely and losing money.

The consequence is what makes it a promise rather than an aspiration, and it is why the number is deliberately one we can keep.

Once a professional is on the way you can watch them approach in the app, the same way you would track a delivery.

This exists to remove the dead time — the part where you have been told 'he is coming' and have no way to know whether that means five minutes or ninety. You can see where they are and plan the rest of your afternoon around it.

Contact details are not handed out freely. Your number is revealed to the professional only once they are most of the way to your address — not when they accept, and never while your request is still circulating among several people — and it stays visible for a short time after the job so a follow-up is possible.

You never see the professional's number. What you see is who they are — name, photo, rating, jobs done, experience and languages — and where they are, on the live map.

This is a rule about when a number is shared, not a claim that every call is routed through a masking layer. We would rather describe what we actually do.

Customers rate professionals and professionals rate customers. A marketplace where only one side is accountable ends up protecting only one side.

If something went wrong, you have a 7-day window after the job to raise a dispute. That is long enough to notice a repair that did not hold, and short enough that both parties can still remember the visit clearly.

What a cancellation costs depends on how far the job had progressed, and the ladder runs in one direction only.

Before a professional accepts, nothing has been committed on either side, and a cancellation costs you nothing.

There is a grace window immediately after acceptance where you can still change your mind without penalty — a wrong tap should not cost money.

Once the professional is en route, a share is retained, because someone has begun spending their day on your job. Once they have arrived, more is retained, for the same reason: their time was genuinely used.

If no professional was ever found, or the professional cancels or fails to arrive, you are made whole in full.

The exact proportions at each rung are written into the customer terms and quoted in the app before you confirm a cancellation, and they can be revised in the HomyZone admin — so this page describes the ladder's shape and the terms carry the current figures. The shape does not change: the further along the job, the more of the professional's time you are compensating.

If a professional accepts your job and never arrives, you are not the one who absorbs it. The booking is closed out in your favour and it counts against them.

If a customer books a job, a professional travels out, and nobody is there, that is protected too. The professional's time is compensated and repeated no-shows count against the customer's account.

Both of those have to exist. Protecting only customers produces a platform professionals leave; protecting only professionals produces one customers never trust.

It is always tempting to agree the next job directly and cut the platform out. What actually gets cut out is every mechanism on this page.

Off-platform, there is no start PIN confirming who turned up, no completion PIN putting you in control of when the job closes, no arrival promise with a consequence attached, no tracking, no rating that follows the professional, and no dispute window. If the work fails a week later, it is your word against theirs with nothing behind either.

That is the reason HomyZone discourages taking jobs off-platform, and it is the reason it matters to the customer at least as much as to us.