Terms of use

The short version

Three things carry most of the weight on this page. If you read nothing else, read these.

1. Your contract for the work is with your contractor, not with us. We introduce you. They do the job, set the price and stand behind it.
2. Our checks are narrow, and we list exactly what they do not cover. A badge is a record of a document we looked at on a date. It is not a view on whether somebody is good at their job. We have never seen their work.
3. We are not in the payment. You pay your contractor directly. We cannot hold, stop, reverse or refund that money, because it never comes near us.

None of this reduces the rights the law gives you where you live. Consumer law in every country we operate in gives you rights that a document like this one cannot take away, and we are not trying to. If anything here reads as though it takes away such a right, it does not apply to you to that extent, and the rest of the page still stands.

What Taskovery is, and what it is not

Taskovery is the trading name of Trustlane LLC, a limited liability company formed in the State of Montana, United States. The company name has not changed, so you will see both: Taskovery is what the service is called, Trustlane LLC is who you are contracting with. In these terms, “Taskovery”, “we” and “us” mean Trustlane LLC.

Trustlane LLC connects people who need work done to contractors who do it. That is the whole of what we do.

When you hire a contractor through Taskovery, your contract for that work is with the contractor, not with us. They decide what to charge, when they can come, and how they do the job. We are not a party to it, we do not supervise it, and we do not carry it out.

Read that alongside what we say on Trust & safety, because it is the single most important thing on this page:

• We do not vet anyone’s workmanship. Nobody at Taskovery has seen a contractor’s work, inspected a job, or formed a view on whether they are any good at it.
• We do not guarantee outcomes, quality, timing, or price.
• We do not insure your job, and we do not offer any product that pays you back if it goes wrong.
• We do not employ the contractors. They are independent businesses, and they are not our agents. Nobody on Taskovery can make a promise on our behalf.

What we do claim is narrow and specific, and it is set out under what we check.

What we are responsible for

We are responsible for doing our own job properly. That means running the checks we say we run, with reasonable care and skill, and describing what they found honestly. If we fail to do that and you suffer loss because of it, we are responsible for that, and nothing on this page limits it. That is a different thing from the contractor’s work, which is theirs.

If you need our entity registration number or a registered agent address for a formal notice, email help@trustlane.co.nz and we will give them to you.

Your account

You need to be 18 or over and in a country we operate in: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia or New Zealand.

Sign in with a code emailed to you, or with a password if you have set one. Keep it to yourself: anything done from your account is treated as done by you. Tell us at help@trustlane.co.nz straight away if you think someone else is in it.

Give us information that is true, and keep it current. That matters more than it sounds: a wrong city sends the wrong contractors, and a wrong trading name fails a check.

One account per person. You can close yours whenever you like from Profile → Settings.

What we check, exactly

We run four named checks on a contractor, and every profile shows all of them whether or not that contractor has done them. Two are required before they can apply for a job, and which two depends on what they signed up as.

• Identity. A government photo ID matching the person running the profile. Required of everyone.
• Business. A company or business registration in the name they trade under, filed with whichever public registry is the right one where they are: Companies House in the United Kingdom, the Companies Registration Office in Ireland, ASIC in Australia, the Companies Office in New Zealand, the provincial or federal registry in Canada, the state registry in the United States. Required of a company.
• Proof of address. A statement, letter or bill from the last three months, in the same name as their ID. Required of a sole trader, who often has no company record to be checked against. We never publish it.
• Trade licence. Where the trade is licensed or registered where they work, a current registration on the relevant public register or scheme. Optional, and the only optional one. Most trades in most of our countries are not licensed at all, which is exactly why this badge is optional and why its absence tells you nothing.

A contractor who has not passed the two that apply to them cannot apply for your job or be awarded one. They can still build a profile, be found and be contacted, so you may meet one who is partway through.

What a badge is, and what it is not

A badge records a document we looked at, on a date, and it shows that date. It says what was true when we looked. It does not say anything is true today.

Gating job applications on these checks is a rule about who may use Taskovery. It is not a recommendation, an endorsement, an approval, or a view about any contractor. Passing our checks means somebody proved who they are. It does not mean we think you should hire them.

Here is the closed list of what we do not check, and we would rather be blunt than let you assume:

• We do not check insurance. We do not require contractors to hold public liability insurance and we do not verify any that they hold. Ask your contractor directly, and ask to see it.
• We do not run criminal record checks on anyone.
• We do not check credit, solvency, or whether a business has debts or judgments against it.
• We do not check workmanship, competence, qualifications, training or experience.
• We do not check that a licence covers your particular job. A licensed plumber is not necessarily a registered gas fitter. See high-risk work.
• We do not check employees or subcontractors. Our checks are on the person running the profile. If they send somebody else to your home, we have not checked that person at all.
• We do not re-check continuously. A licence can lapse the day after we saw it.

We re-run the licence check periodically and re-date the badge when we do. A badge older than its date is a record, not a promise. Use your own judgement as well, and ask the questions you would ask anyone you found any other way.

If a document a contractor sends us does not check out, they do not get that badge. If we conclude a document was deliberately falsified, we close the account and it stops being visible to customers.

Restricted and high-risk work

Some work is dangerous, and in most of our countries some of it may only be done by somebody holding a specific registration. Gas. Electrical work. Asbestos. Structural work. Work at height. Water and drainage in some places.

Our trade licence badge does not tell you that a contractor is registered for your particular job. It tells you they held a registration we could find on a public register on the date shown. Trades are narrower than they look, and the registration that covers a bathroom refit is not the one that covers moving a gas line.

If your job touches any of the above, ask to see the specific registration for that work, and check it yourself on the public register for your country. Every one of those registers is free and public. If a contractor will not show you, do not let them start.

Contractors: you must hold every licence, registration and permit the law where you work requires for the work you take on, and keep them current. Do not accept work you are not registered to do.

In an emergency

Taskovery is not an emergency service and nobody is watching it around the clock. Do not post a job and wait if somebody is in danger.

If you can smell gas, if there is fire, if water is near electricity, or if anyone is hurt, call your emergency number, which is 911 where you are, and your gas or electricity network operator. Deal with the danger first. Find a contractor afterwards.

If you are hiring

Taskovery costs you nothing. No fee, no add-on, no service charge, no commission, no insurance product. Posting a job, reading the connections, browsing a trade and messaging a contractor are all free, and the price your contractor quotes is the exact amount that leaves your account. We are paid by the contractor’s side, a flat monthly amount that has nothing to do with what you pay them, and those numbers are published.

You choose who you hire. We order results, and we tell you when placement has been paid for, but nobody can buy their way into your job.

Your street address is shared only with the contractor you choose, and only once you have chosen them. Your email address is never handed over. Your phone number is shown to a contractor once you are connected to them, so they can ring you about the job; it is not shown to contractors you have not dealt with.

Either side can cancel before work starts, with no fee and no penalty from us. Whatever you and your contractor agreed between yourselves still stands.

If you are a contractor

You are an independent business. You set your own prices, decide which jobs to take and which to refuse, choose your own hours, use your own tools and materials, and may work for anyone else including our competitors. You are responsible for your own tax, insurance, licensing and compliance with the law. Nothing here makes you our employee, our worker, our agent or our partner in the legal sense, and we do not direct or control how you do a job.

What you pay

We take no commission on your work. Not a percentage, not a fee per job, not a cut of anything a customer pays you. You pay a monthly plan, and the plan gives you a monthly allowance of tokens. Answering a job spends tokens.

• Solo: $49 a month, 55 tokens.
• Steady: $99 a month, 120 tokens.
• Crew: $199 a month, 260 tokens.
• Pro: $399 a month, 560 tokens.
• Placement: $29 for 7 days in one trade in one area, if you want it.

What answering costs depends on what the job is worth, not on which plan you are on. Every plan reaches every job.

The figure is 1.8% of the estimated value of the work, a minimum of 2 tokens and a maximum of 45. We estimate that value from what the customer wrote, and it is checked before the job goes out. The exact number of tokens is shown to you before you answer, and you are never charged a figure you were not shown. If you think an estimate is wrong, tell us and we will look at it.

• A job worth $150 costs 3 tokens.
• A job worth $1,000 costs 18 tokens.
• A job worth $2,500 or more costs 45 tokens, which is the cap.

At most three contractors can answer any job. We do not sell a fourth introduction to a job that already has three, because it could not become a conversation.

Your first answer is free. After that, tokens come off your balance when you answer, and only when you answer. Appearing in a list, being messaged, being rung and sending a price cost nothing.

Nothing caps how many jobs you can run at the same time. Take on as many as you can handle. Your allowance limits how many jobs you can answer in a month, and nothing else.

Tokens do not roll over. Your balance resets to your plan's allowance each month, so an unused token is gone rather than banked. If you run out before the month ends you can still be found, messaged, rung and quoted; you cannot answer a new job until your allowance resets or you move to a larger plan.

When there is a plan to pay for

These apply from the day you first choose a paid plan, and not before.

Your plan renews each month until you cancel. You can cancel at any time, in the app, in two taps, and you never have to email us or ring anyone to do it. Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep the plan until the end of the period you have paid for. Without a current plan you cannot take on new jobs, and any job already under way is unaffected.

We will email you a receipt after every charge, and a reminder before a renewal.

If we change the price of a plan you are on, we will tell you by email before it happens, and the new price only ever applies from your next billing period, never the one you are in. If you do not want the new price, cancel before it takes effect and you will not be charged it.

Beyond the cancellation right above, whether you can get money back for a period you have already paid for depends on the law where you live, and those rights are not affected by anything on this page. If you think something has gone wrong with a charge, email us and we will look at it properly.

Tax and currency

All prices on this site are in US dollars and are exclusive of sales tax, VAT, GST, HST, QST and any similar transaction tax.

Where we are registered for such a tax where you are, and are required to charge it, we will add it and show it to you before you pay. Where you are a business that has to account for the tax yourself, we will invoice without it and say so on the invoice. You tell us truthfully whether you are buying for a business and give us your tax registration number where you have one, and you keep that up to date, because it decides which of those two applies. If a tax authority later assesses us for tax we did not charge because of what you told us, that is yours to cover.

If your card is not in US dollars, your bank sets the exchange rate and may add its own foreign transaction fee. We do not set that rate and we receive no part of that fee. The amount in your own currency will not be the same every month, even when our price has not changed.

Placement, said plainly

Contractors who have bought placement appear above others in Best match, and every card lifted that way is marked Promoted where the customer can see it. Closest and Top rated have no placement at all and cannot be bought.

Your plan does not buy position. A contractor on Pro appears exactly where a contractor on Solo appears. What the plan buys is an allowance of tokens, and nothing else.

Placement does not affect your rating, your reviews or your badges. None of those are for sale, to anyone, at any price.

Your profile and your reviews

You choose what goes on your profile. Your rating, your review count, the reviews themselves and your verification badges have no visibility switch, on any plan. That cuts both ways, and it is exactly why a good review here is worth something.

You can reply publicly to any review. We remove a review only where it breaks the rules below, not because it is unflattering.

How money works

You pay your contractor. Taskovery is not in the payment at all. We do not take it, hold it, pass it on, or receive any part of it, and there is no account of ours it travels through.

A contractor names a price after seeing the job. There is no published rate card and no bidding. Nothing is owed until you accept a price. Once you accept, your contractor invoices you directly and you settle it with them the way you would with any contractor you found yourself.

What this means for you, said plainly

Because we are not in the payment, we cannot stop, reverse, hold or refund it. If the work is not right, you take it up with your contractor, exactly as you would if you had found them any other way. That is a real limit and you should know it before you accept a price, not after.

What you keep either way: your rights under the consumer law where you live, which never depended on how you paid and cannot be signed away; the verification checks on your contractor; the record of the price you both agreed; and the ability to report a contractor and leave a review.

Holding other people’s money is a regulated activity, and we would rather be plainly outside it.

What contractors pay us

Nothing you pay reaches us. Contractors pay us a flat monthly plan, which gives them an allowance of tokens to answer jobs with. It is the same amount whether they bill you $200 or $20,000, so nothing about what we charge them depends on what you pay them, and nothing is added to the price you were quoted.

Taskovery charges customers nothing, for anything, at any point. There is no booking fee, no service charge, no insurance product and no optional extra.

Reviews

A review can only be left by a customer whose job was actually connected and completed through Taskovery. We do not buy reviews, we do not write them, and we do not let anyone pay to have one removed or hidden.

We do not sort, filter or promote by sentiment. Placement lifts a card in Best match and says so on the card; it does nothing to which reviews are shown or to the rating. Every review a contractor has is shown, good and bad.

We remove a review only where it names somebody who is not party to the job, contains personal information, is abusive or discriminatory, is about a job that did not happen, or was arranged between the two parties. We keep a record of every review we remove and why.

Do not offer anyone anything in exchange for a review, and do not condition anything on a review being positive. If you are a contractor, you may ask a customer to leave a review. You may not ask them to leave a good one.

House rules

Do not use Taskovery to:

• pretend to be someone you are not, or trade under a name that isn’t yours
• post work that is illegal, or that you are not licensed or registered to do
• harass, threaten, or discriminate against anyone
• write a review of a job that did not happen, or arrange reviews between yourselves
• scrape, copy or resell profiles, or automate access to the service
• ask a customer for a deposit or payment before you have given them a price they accepted
• use more than one account to get around a limit on your own

Contractors: where you take a deposit after a price is accepted, some places cap what you may ask for on home improvement work, and the cap applies whatever the customer agreed. Know the rule where you work. Say what the deposit is for and what happens to it if the job does not go ahead.

We will never ring, text or email you asking for a payment, a deposit, or your card to “verify your account”. If that happens it is not us. Report it to help@trustlane.co.nz.

Suspending or closing an account

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these rules.

If you are a contractor, being removed costs you work, so we do not do it silently. We tell you what the problem is and give you a reason in writing. Except where we are acting on an immediate risk to somebody’s safety, a legal obligation, or a rule you have broken repeatedly after being told, we give you notice before your account is closed and a chance to put it right or explain. If we suspend you and then conclude we were wrong, we put you back.

Where someone is at risk, we act first and explain afterwards.

You can close your own account at any time. Closing it does not end a job already under way between you and somebody else.

Your rights, and the limits of ours

Your consumer rights come first

The consumer law where you live gives you rights that nothing on this page reduces. That is true in every country we operate in, and in several of them a business is not permitted even to suggest otherwise. So, plainly: nothing in these terms limits or excludes any right, guarantee or remedy the law gives you and does not let us contract out of. To the extent anything here would, it does not apply to you.

Your rights against your contractor apply to their work regardless of how you paid, and are not affected by anything we do or do not do. Where the trade is licensed or registered where you live, the body that registers them is a route open to you as well.

What we do not limit, at all

We do not exclude or limit our responsibility for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not permit us to limit. That is true everywhere on this page, including in the list immediately below.

Where we are not responsible

Subject to both paragraphs above, and because we are a connection service rather than a party to the job:

• we are not responsible for the work a contractor does, the price they charge, or whether they turn up
• we are not responsible for the conduct of a contractor or a customer towards each other, except where our own negligence caused the harm
• we are not responsible for what a user writes, including in a review or a message, beyond acting on it when it is reported to us
• we do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or error-free

If you use Taskovery for a business, then to the extent the law allows us to limit it, our total responsibility to you for everything connected with Taskovery in any twelve month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and US$500. We are not responsible to a business user for lost profit, lost business or lost opportunity.

We do not apply that cap to a consumer.

If something goes wrong

Talk to us first. Email help@trustlane.co.nz. Most things are a misunderstanding and get sorted once someone explains it. We will answer, and we will not make you chase us.

If your problem is with the work itself, it is between you and your contractor, and your consumer rights apply. We will give you the records we hold about the job to help you sort it out, including the price you agreed and the messages between you.

If the two of you cannot agree, the usual next step is the small claims process where you live, which in most of our countries does not need a lawyer. Where the trade is licensed or registered, a complaint to the body that registers them is open to you too.

If your problem is with us, and we cannot resolve it between us, you keep every right to take it further, and you do not need our permission. The consumer regulator for your country is independent of us and free to complain to: in the United States your state attorney general’s consumer protection office or the Federal Trade Commission, in Canada your provincial consumer affairs office, in the United Kingdom Trading Standards through the Citizens Advice consumer service, in Ireland the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, in Australia the ACCC or your state fair trading office, and in New Zealand the Commerce Commission.

We do not ask you to give up your right to go to court, and we do not require arbitration. We do not stop you joining others in a claim.

Our name and this site

Taskovery, the wordmark, the apps and this site are ours. What you write stays yours: you keep ownership of your profile text, photos, job posts, messages and reviews, and you give us permission to display them where the service needs to, for as long as your account is open. Where a review or a job record has to outlive the account for the service to make sense, we say so in the privacy policy.

Changes

We may update these terms. If a change matters to you we will tell you before it takes effect, not after. If you are a contractor we will give you at least 15 days’ notice of a change, unless we have to move faster to meet a legal obligation. If you keep using Taskovery after a change takes effect, the new terms apply. If you would rather not accept them, you can close your account, and if you are on a paid plan you can cancel without penalty.

Which law applies, and where you can bring a claim

This depends on where you are, because the law in several of our countries does not let a business move a consumer somewhere else to argue with them, and we are not going to try.

• If you are a consumer in the United Kingdom: the law of the part of the UK where you live applies, and you can bring proceedings in the courts there.
• If you are a consumer in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or Canada: the law of the country, and the state, province or territory where you live applies, and you can bring proceedings in the courts there.
• If you are a consumer in the United States: the law of the State of Montana applies and the courts of Montana have jurisdiction, except where the law of the state you live in gives you a right to bring your claim at home, in which case it does.
• If you use Taskovery for a business, anywhere: the law of the State of Montana applies, and the courts of Montana have non-exclusive jurisdiction, which means we can be sued there and it does not stop a court where you are from hearing a claim it decides it should hear.

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still stands.

The general bits

We may transfer these terms to another company if the business is sold or reorganised, and your rights are not reduced by that. You may not transfer your account to somebody else.

If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

If something genuinely outside our control stops us running the service, such as a network failure, an outage at a supplier, or a natural disaster, we are not in breach for the time it lasts, and we will tell you what is happening.

Notices to us go to help@trustlane.co.nz. Notices to you go to the email address on your account, so keep it current.

These terms, the privacy policy, and any rules published for a specific promotion are the whole of the agreement between us about Taskovery.